HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

There are concerns about the HPE team in the Southeast Asia region, suggesting a need for improvements in terms of responsiveness. There have been instances where the response time was slow, causing challenges during urgent situations. Its stability also needs to improve. 

I have been using the product for five years. 

We haven't received any complaints about the tool's stability. It works properly in a five-year lifetime. 

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The product's competitor is Dell. 

The solution's deployment was easy. 

The solution's pricing is high. It needs to be more flexible. The flexibility would be beneficial for our clients, especially in a competitive market. Adding additional features and addressing complex requirements on top of the price can be challenging for us as a reseller.

In project tenders, system requirements are specified, including the number of cores, storage, and personnel needed. The information is shared with the HPE team to prepare a BQ specifying the server model to be used. The tool is a good physical server. 

The choice of server category or type is not specific and varies case by case. Customers may initially purchase higher servers than their immediate requirements, anticipating future use cases. It's a complex decision and depends on individual circumstances.

The product's roadmap seems to be good. Its deployments are mostly on-prem due to government regulations.

The product is purchased specifically for security solutions, not for the entire data center stack. It is recommended for medium to enterprise-level customers. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the servers to run our student information system. It's an accounting package within the bursary of the university.

We are currently on generation 8 or 9. The solution is hardware, so it's deployed on-prem.

Apart from users, there are five people that interact with the hardware directly. There are others who interact with the services that run from these servers. It's a school environment, so there are about 30,000 or more students and staff.

Previously, when we were using Zimbra for email services, it was run locally. We have stopped using that because we subscribe to Microsoft Office 360 email services, which run from the cloud. That has been taken off the servers. 

Now that other applications are being developed, we hope to eventually be able to cater for the different administrative and academic departments in the university. We are hoping that some of this hardware will definitely have to be replaced. Of course, that will depend on the budget and the availability of funds that the university management is willing to make available. But it's going to be a step-by-step thing. There has to be planning and then budgetary provisions to be able to take care of these items.

We are just customers. We don't have a direct link with HPE, but through the HPE product suppliers. We have a new direct now, and in one of the meetings we had, he came up with the idea of finding a way to having that direct contact with HPE or Synergy and how perhaps we could patronize each other in terms of the servers, in terms of PCs for staff and students, and the kind of technical support that we can equally enjoy from HPE.

Where there is a need to actually expand on the capacity, it's easily done, especially when more memory is needed.

We have been experiencing a problem with the power pack. It gets fried and then we have to do a replacement.

There is a challenge sometimes with having quick access to some of these components when you need them. It takes a lot of time to get spare parts from genuine sellers.

You need the memories for servers. They're delivered. You put them in, and the system doesn't come up, so you have to return them. For me, that has been the major challenge.

In the day-to-day running, there's always room for improvement. If you need assistance in real time, it would be helpful if there was such a room where someone could be there and help you solve the problem in real time.

The number of people you are serving is increasing by the day, and they need immediate solutions to their issues. Sometimes you have limitations as to getting solutions to some of these issues that come up, but you are dependent on the information available to you. Being the product manufacturers also, I'm sure they have a lot of solutions to the different issues depending on the feedback they've been able to get from the field all across the world, especially those using their products. I think that would go a long way in helping.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

The main challenge we actually have is the issue of having a good, steady power supply. Whenever there's a power outage, it forces the server to go down. That in itself increases the rate of failure of the hardware. By implication, the services that have been provided are truncated at one point or the other. Management has promised to see how they can intervene in that respect, but that is left to be seen.

The scalability is fine for the limited number of services and the need to actually scale. Because of this same power issue, I had to virtualize where we have to run different services on the same hardware server. That is where the issue of expanding the memory capacity came in. 

In terms of the processor, we have not been able to do that. The reason is because you send for a part, it is brought in, you plug it in, and then there's a mismatch. Then the system doesn't run well. You have to return it. But I think it will expand our memory and expand the storage. We haven't been able to expand or increase the processing and the processor capacity. But we would be glad to have any other information we need to know or other skills that we need to learn to allow us to manage this equipment better and to maximize or to optimize their usage, that would be good enough.

Technical support has been okay regarding looking for solutions on the internet. When you have certain challenges and make a post in the forum seeking an immediate solution, it all depends on who gets those queries and is able to respond. In most cases, we have been able to get the solutions from the past experience of others who have had similar issues that have been put in the repository. 

On the whole, I think it's good enough even though we haven't been able to directly chat one-on-one or about issues.

It can only get difficult depending on what application or operating system you want to install. Then it all depends on how good or how skillful one is with the particular application. But the installation and configuration is never a problem. There has never been a problem with the hardware that I can say, apart from the issues I have already mentioned.

We have different people for different specific assignments. For each team, we have a good number of people. We are thinking of expanding because the university is a multi-campus university, and it has about four campuses, even though the whole thing is being centrally run. We are thinking of having these services run 24/7, and then we would need to have more hands so no one is overwhelmed with the work on ground. Currently, for those manning the server, we have about five people.

Implementation was completed by our own technical team from within the ICT directorate.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

The commonality between the systems is very valuable, and it is very easy to manage.

It helped us a lot because it's a very stable solution.

It's not changing very much in terms of handling from generation to generation. So every time they introduce a new ProLiant generation, it's very easy for our operations team to adopt it; and it's very easy for us to adapt to the new features.

Because of the commonality between systems, we also have a very lean and optimized process for replacing people when resources need to be moved around. I think that's the main benefit of the ProLiant platform.

My personal opinion is that the rack-mount kits in generation four were the best. The current ones are kind of overcomplicated to mount, so I would really like to go back to how the rack mount worked when we had the G4. This would really be an improvement.

It's rock solid. I have never seen a ProLiant server breaking down for no reason.

I think for us the scalability is definitely sufficient. We have the two-socket series and the four-socket series. We did not look beyond that because it's just not in our requirements; but we are fine with what we have.

They are very efficient, fast and friendly. They know their products. It was a good experience.

When I joined the company, we were on Compaq ProLiant and we stayed with it. For HP, the ProLiant series is still a strategic product. If you look at other vendors, say IBM, they even sold the X86 server business. So there are not too many vendors in the business who have a very strategic X86 server series, and HP is obviously one of them.

It's a data center. Things go in and out. I was a system administrator myself many years ago, so I set up a lot of HPE ProLiant systems. They were very easy to set up in the past. They have become even easier. I would say that half of the strength of the ProLiant servers is the software and the additional tools that HPE provides.

IBM fell off our short list of vendors because they just gave up the business.

Dell didn’t have the same level of stability, maintainability, and range of products that we have with the ProLiant series.

Investigate some use case scenarios relevant for your daily business perspective, for example:

• What do you need to do to change defective hardware in your system?
• What do you need to do to upgrade your systems?

Check the workflows:

• How easy is it to change the parts?
• How easy is it to access the server?

Do you have the right documentation already in the server, like it is for HPE; or do you need external sources to know what you are doing?

We do work for defense and government clients. 

ProLiant servers are more reliable than other platforms.

My customers are tilted toward GPU users, and the mixed version of the enabled hard drives require — flash drives, SSD, NNL, and PLAS — all mixed and matched in a single box. These are requirements I've already shared with the HPE account manager. 

Customers want the tiering concept inside a box, which is currently part of the storage system, but customers require it in a server. They want the operating system over PLAS and the IO-related things on SSD.  The rest of their data is on NLSF. 

I've worked with ProLiant servers for 10 years. 

Stability is where HPE dominates competitors like Dell and Cisco. The servers are highly reliable, and we are impressed with the technology HPE offers.

Scalability in terms of GPUs and storage is a concern. 

I have a direct connection with the HPE account manager responsible for the government and defense verticals. I am happy with the person. We rely on our own in-house support for servers. However, we use a professional service for storage and three-power or CI systems.

HPE servers are highly user-friendly. It takes two or three hours from start to finish for bare-metal installation. With virtualization, it'll take four to six hours.

We are working with the customers in government and defense, where HPE already has a foothold. The requirements come from the customer, and they use HPE, so we do, too. We have to consider the customer's stability and comfort level. 

I rate HPE ProLiant Servers nine out of 10. In my country, it's better for customers to rely on the vendor who delivers the solution. We think the HPE server is better than others for that.

Our primary use case of HPE ProLiant DL Servers is virtualization. We also host three servers on it: our active directory, file server, and web server. 

One of the most valuable features is iLO, which is very good. Another thing is the HPE support is very good. 

We have been using this solution for two and a half years. 

This solution is stable, and we use it daily. 

HPE ProLiant is scalable. 

In our organization, we have 100 users of this solution. We are using it for our entire data center. 

The technical support is very good. For the initial level, they provided me very good support for the installation of the servers and all the things after that. Somehow one hard disk crashed, so we logged a call at HPE and an engineer came the next day to replace the hard drive and explain how to prevent this type of issue. So, we have been a customer of HPE for more than 10 years. 

The initial setup is a little bit complicated, but after that, it's very easy to deploy the server. 

We had a third-party vendor help us with deployment. 

We have seen a ROI. We have improved because there is an entire platform moved on virtualization. Also, there is good support of HPE, so we have minimized our data center downtime 0.1%. 

This was a one-time purchase for us because it's hardware that we purchased from HPE. There aren't any licensing costs. 

I rate this product a nine out of ten. To those considering implementation, I would advise them to calculate their commercial as well as their data load and user load. After that, you can choose a solution from HPE. 

At present, we are using Gen 7, 8. We have used Gen 10 for some of our customers.

We use the solution for providing hotel support. We're into the hotels of mostly Windows operating system, Oracle and SQL database.

Performance and reliability are the most valuable features. 

We have encountered problems. The most pressing issue is that downloads depend at present on the current period. Secondly, in respect of the iLO access license page, iLO features should be included with the server. 

I have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for more than 10 years.

The scalability is fine.

HPE technical support is sufficiently good. Support as a side of the business can be purchased. 

The initial setup was easy.

The deployment time varies with the configuration, something which does not take more than two hours. While installing the operating system is a discussion of its own, the actual configuration is easy to do. 

We did not make use of consultants or resellers for the deployment. 

The size of the staff required for the deployment varies with the configuration. It takes just a day to install a single server, but nearly two or three days if making use of visualization and multiple operations. 

The solution comes with a one time perpetual license which is included with the server. It entails costs beyond that of the standard fee. 

The solution is mostly deployed on private cloud. 

I can safely state that we have more than 100 users making use of the solution, since we have installed more than 10 or 20 servers to different locations.

The basic package can include iLO features.

I rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers as a nine out of ten.

We have one SQL server, one repository called Solidworks Designs, and one called Karmatic.

The most valuable feature of the solution is scalability.

The licensing fees are expensive and have room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We purchased enough resources to ensure we could meet our requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward and took a few minutes. The deployment was simple. We only needed to install a Windows server.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have to pay for an annual license which is expensive.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We have twenty people using the solution in our organization and plan to increase that number to 30.

We require five people to maintain the solution consisting of managers and automation engineers.

I recommend the solution to others.

We primarily use the solution in our company and our client's company.

I trust the hardware mostly. 

There are some features like intelligent provisioning, et cetera, which are quite useful.

The ILO for management is great.

It's scalable.

The solution is stable and reliable. 

I want to improve hyper-converged sites. We are mostly working with the DL series, however, now we are trying to work with more hyper-converged.

I've used the solution for more than 20 years. 

We are really happy with HP ProLiant Servers. They are stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We find the solution to be scalable. 

At this time, we have more than 100 users on the solution. 

We work with clients that have companies that vary in size, from small to large.

Technical support has been great. I have been quite satisfied with their level of assistance.

We use ProLiant Servers and SimpliVity. We've also worked with Dell. The quality of HP is better here in Turkey. It's faster, and they come with spare parts. There's a shorter timeframe to replace hardware if parts are defective. 

How difficult or straightforward the implementation process is depends on the customer's location. We have lots of customers in Turkey. Some of them are complex, and some of them are simple.

We have three admins that can handle maintenance tasks. 

While the price is okay, the price of Dell is lower. 

I'm a reseller. We are HPE partners.

I'd advise users to try HP. It's a good solution. However, it depends on the customer. Some prefer working with Dell. If a company already has Dell infrastructure, we advise them to continue with Dell to have a homogenous environment. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

When you compare hyper-converged with ProLiant, hyper-converged is more available due to the clusters; you can cluster it. However, for ProLiant, you have to find a solution with VMware or something like that, for example,  third-party solutions. That said, on the hardware side, ProLiant has no cluster option.