HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

We've got a whole lot of DL380's which are the standard 2U server. We've been switching more over to the blades using the BL460's. But, the ProLiant line all along just works, they're tanks. About the only thing we've ever had to fix is drives that go bad after a while, but usually that mostly happened after a heat incident. They just run. We've got some that have been out of warranty for four - five years and they're still running. G4s we go back to and love we have no reason to change.

For certain applications that we have to have for external connectivity it runs great. Our main security system has one of these little USB dongles that starts off the back end, I could make it on the blade, but then it'd block up one blade, so having a DL380 is great for us. It does everything we ever need.

I think we started buying HP servers ten years ago, and we've got a couple that may have been from that time that are still working. They're running great. Now we're not running it really heavy, but it's solid. I still like the 3.5 inch drives better than the 2.5 inch drives. They seem to last longer. Other than that, we've been very stable, very solid. You don't have to worry about, "Hey, is my server down today?"

ProLiant's a little tough. We realized that the other day, that we were running out of space on our C: drive. It's like, I can't just add to a physical drive. We ended up having to move that thing, making it a physical to virtual conversion. As far as other parts, if we need more storage on it, you can always add RAM. For the most part with the ProLiants, we generally buy it for a certain purpose and that's what it does so we don't have to do as much. On the SANs, we can always add an extra node, they'll allow you to connect that way. If we need to get larger, we can.

Most of them, we don't really have any issues there, but if you lose a drive and it's still on warranty, we get one. It works.

We were using Dell. Dell was the state recommended choice. Everybody said, "Oh, you got to buy Dell because we've got a relationship with them." They got my boss really mad over some stupid stuff. It was like two-hundred dollar set of rails, and so we said, "Okay, let's try HP's." We loved the first one, and we've been buying them, and Dell has been trying to get back in the door ever since and we just tell them to go away. It's like, "No, I'm not fixing what isn't broken. This works great, so we don't care what you've got."

We've been doing the ProLiants forever. It's getting a little tougher now. It used to be, you had everything on a CD or DVD, you pop that in, you run. Or you had the SmartStart disk. Now, you got their onboard administrator. They got the intelligent deployment guide or whatever the heck it's called. Sometimes it's a little less intuitive. Sometimes it's where technology can bite you, and it might be helpful to have a guy go on and say "Do this." Otherwise you pull it out of the box and go, "Okay, now what do I do?" We work through it, but some of my techs have had a little bit of trouble. I gave them a new server and said,"Deploy it.", and they're like "Well, how do I put an OS on it?" It took us a little while to figure that out. I know that somebody's thinking, "Hey, this is really great. It's all here, it's all inside." Great, some of us need a little more direction sometimes.

I think we looked around, but really it was Dell servers or HPs were about all that we had considered. Since we weren't going to buy Dell anymore, we said, "Well, we want to go with HP." We were never going to be one of those, "I'm going to go buy parts and make something." And, I know some guys do that and it's great, but we like to have at least the ability to go call somebody to get somebody to come and help. That's been probably chief on why we did that.

We've been extremely happy all along. I don't see a reason to go anywhere else. I don't see a reason to even try different things. For us right now getting adventurous is we bought a DL360 instead of a 380 and it's like, wow, that's a little small.

It has easy manageability, and with iLO we are able to do everything remotely.

It's just a computer server, so we just use them for whatever things we can't virtualize so it's nothing very special in that regard as far as what sets HPEs apart from somebody else's there.

We're looking forward to OneView management, stuff like that to keep it all in check. But there's not really anything specific. It will provide a single pane of glass for management instead of going out to 50 different servers and configuring things so you get, set up a template, or do the different things through OneView. Just kick it off and replicate and automate what you're doing.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I've used other platforms in the past, but nothing specific. We wanted to have a single pane of glass for management and have consistency as much as we can so we stick with one vendor overall between blades, between rack mounts, between everything.

Proliant, they're fine. I mean it's compute, it's pretty hard to mess it up these days.

I've been a ProLiant customer for years, since the late '90s. The ProLiant series has been very innovative over the years, compared to some of the competition that are not so innovative. It's very dependable, and they keep maturing the product more and more. Especially now, I'm looking at the Hyper Converged 380, so they're re-inventing new ways to use that technology. That's a great thing right there, with the Hyper Converged space as well. The management of them is valuable. I specifically don't use them on a daily basis, I have my engineers that do since they can easily manage the servers.

It's more of a rack server, it's more of a commodity kind of device. I know what I'm buying when I buy from HPE. I get that reliable server, good service, good support, and it works.

This server is separate from the next one and I'd like it to be integrated so it becomes all-in-one.

It's very stable.

Over the years that I've been involved with a lot of different server manufacturers as far as rack managed servers, Cisco C-Series, IBM X-Series, and a lot of HPE. They're comparable in many ways but we choose a lot of HPE because we know we're getting a good, reliable product and at a good price point.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

Look at the Hyper Converged as everything's going to virtual, so look at the ProLiant in a Hyper Converged space.

The scalability. We use it for our infrastructure because we keep up with the latest generation of technology and so the scalability, the form factor, everything plays well into our data center infrastructure.

It's helpful to have standardized platforms, and so from that standpoint it works very well for our environment at our company because we have a vast distributed data center infrastructure across multiple locations so it helps to have standardized platforms to reduce operating expense and extend the lifecycle of the product. It would just be ease of maintainability and standardization to minimize.

The number of CPUs and maybe administrative interfaces. Nothing that I would site as a concern now. It's the continued maturing of the platform. There's always room for growth but I can't point to more specifics.

It's scalable just based on the physical placements of the hardware and the white space involved on the floor.

We have others that handle any deployment issues.

The more we're able to standardize on a single platform, it lowers our long term cost and it lowers support cost. I think it can be expensive, but in our particular function, we don't get involved in that aspect. The funding aspects are a totally different group, so as long as the technical parameters are met, we don't address that.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition, I don't get involved.

It's reliability, really. It just works. It's one of those we've been using for 10 plus years and I've been in the company for 10 years. We rarely have a failure; and it just keeps working. It kind of base builds, ready to go, whereas before you needed to add bits and pieces. We don't need to do that anymore. Just out of the box, plug it in and it goes.

It's been in for so long, it just works.

I think the big thing for us, which is unique, is a dedicated HPE Cloud offering in New Zealand. It would be quite cool. I don't know if that's actually feasible or viable for HPE. Cloud is something we're interested in, but the solutions in New Zealand aren't really up to it. So you have to go to Australia. You get latency issues.

Through 10 years of various iterations and a lot of cycles of a product every three years. We used to swap out but we're virtualization now, we're taking that in to account, so no issues. We have the odd drive failure, and that's about it.

On the ProLiant, we've opted not to go down the blade enclosure. We went the dedicated service of the DL380s and pretty much the scalability of that is around the network. We've got to look at some virtualization technologies there.

We've logged a few calls. They're amazing, really good. Over the years we've had a few hard-drive failures, yet it's all pretty seamless. We just put in a HPE Networking as well.

When I first started the company was looking at Dell, and I was a Compaq engineer in my day.

It has 26 internal disc slots and will take 12 gig SAS discs. We needed to run a SQL server availability groups on a pair of these, and we needed to be able build a high-speed, high-performance disc array to hold our data. The DL380 Gen-9, along with the P830 controller card with the SAS expander, gives us phenomenal performance on 10K SAS discs. They outperformed our existing SAN by a factor of 8 to 10 times.

These replaced old Dell servers and have half the footprint, being as they're a 2U server. They also used half the power. They saved us considerable amounts of money and hosting costs with our data center. Deploying these servers actually saves us money.

I can't see how you can fit much more into a small server, to be quite honest. If I was to be really picky, it needs to not drop the memory speed when you fill all the memory slots, which is a real niggle, but other than that, they've worked so well. They've done so much for us in cutting our hosting costs over the original four way boxes that these replaced. Their performance is absolutely phenomenal.

They've deployed for us without any issues.

Absolutely stunning. We also use the Gen8 on some of our other systems and the key systems that I support -- our ARP CRM and ticket and billing system. Our billing systems handles roughly two-and-a-half billion pounds a year. It's very critical.

They seem to scale brilliantly, but it's difficult to tell. Our company is a constantly growing business. Our expansion is vast -- twenty percent or more last year. The systems are still holding up really well. In fairness, we specked them up and we benchmark these servers, so the particular way we had these servers built was specific to our use, but they do really well.

We did with the original install, the Gen9's that we had. We had some of the first Gen9's that were released. We did have a slight pickup with a BIOS setting, but HP support sorted that one for us.

I inherited the Dell servers from a legacy. I just replaced them with the HP servers. Those are my preferred choice, always. Without being detrimental to Dell, we don't like their servers very much, and the HP ones have always been far better.

The most valuable features of these servers are their stability and efficiency. We can download all the firmware, drivers, agents, utilities, and any other software as a single download.

We've been with these servers for a long time. We know the book on them and we know the partners who work with us. We have confidence in them, which means we don't need to spend money and waste time on maintenance and other issues unnecessarily.

It could use less power. We want to go green and so want to use as little energy as possible.

We got this a long time ago.

They deploy without any issues.

They're very stable.

We as an organization haven't been growing, so scalability is not relevant for us.

We get technical support through our own partner, not through HP.

My colleagues who set it up said the initial setup was OK. It wasn't simple but it also wasn't complex.

We're not going to see an ROI in 2016, but hopefully in 2017.

I would recommend you use them, especially if you have other HP products.