HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The most valuable features are redundancy, flexibility, and compatibility with operating systems.

The cost and the user experience are two of the main benefits.

In the next release, I would like to see more redundancy of the CPU. That would be great.

The solution is very stable. We have had it for more than ten years, for several generations of the product. It's a very stable solution.

The first version was not so scalable. Today’s versions are very scalable. We are very, very happy with this new version.

We have a maintenance contract for support from the HPE team around the world. We don't use it so much because the solution is very stable. When we do use it, the quality depends on the country. For example, in France, it works very well. However, when we try it in China, it can be a little bit tricky.

We used another solution from another company. However, the cost vs. benefit was not so good. For that reason, we switched to HPE services.

I was involved with the setup. It was very easy to apply.

We worked with Dell and IBM, but we chose HPE.

When selecting a vendor, it's good to have a real relationship in order to get a reliable, ascertainable, and a flexible solution. With this solution, you can close your eyes and you can use it because it's a very stable and personable tool. There is a real relationship between HPE and the customer, and they support you during all the steps you take.

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?

The ProLiant server is where we install our monitoring tools. We are only utilizing about half of its total capacity. We need to install more memory and other hardware to maximize our usage. We're close to the minimum. We have around 20 users for this project across two departments. 

Our monitoring tool has a database, so we need a server with a fast IO. 

I have been using ProLiant servers for three years

The server hasn't failed in three years. Typically, it takes about five years before the power supply or hardware fails.

We configure the server as a standalone. It's not clustered to scale out. We are only just scaling up by installing additional RAM and other hardware as necessary.

At my old company, we used HPE's Blade server.

It's straightforward but requires a little more configuration than Dell because this HPE has an ILO where you can run an independent operating system. A system integrator deployed the server, which took less than a day. Our deployment and maintenance team consists of four engineers and one manager. We followed the installation guide and the standard steps for installing a Windows operating system.

Configuring the ILO operating system added some additional steps that weren't required with Dell. It's running Windows 7 ILO, a step higher than Dell's operating system.

I believe we have seen a return. However, the software accounts for the large cost, so ROI is difficult to calculate from a hardware perspective.

HPE ProLiant servers are priced about the same as Dell's, maybe a little more. 

I rate HPE ProLiant servers nine out of 10. I would recommend them if you live in an area where HPE has a strong support presence. In Qatar, HPE doesn't have as much support as Dell. I would recommend Dell if given the option because it has a solid local presence.

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.

It is mainly an x86 Intel server. There are some versions of AMD processors as well. You can use it for many purposes. You can use it as a web server, a backup server, a database server, or an application server. You can use it for any main purpose for which you need a server.

It is mainly on-premises, but you can also deploy it in a cloud.

It is very stable. This is the feedback that I'm getting from my customers for the hardware. It is also 100% scalable.

HPE is also very specialized when it comes up to the server industry. It is not only about the rack servers; it is also about the blade servers. They were the first ones to bring these to the market more than ten years ago. 

It has something called WorldView. They should do some enhancement over WorldView to run an operating system as a code. Such a feature would be amazing for running multiple servers. They are already working on this, and they can enhance the existing versions for this.

It should also be cheaper. It is currently expensive.

I have been selling this solution for almost six years.

It is very stable.

It is 100% scalable. We have about a hundred customers.

I don't directly get in touch with them, but I haven't heard anything bad about it.

The initial setup is not complicated for HPE or any other server.

It is expensive. Its price should be better.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers an eight out of ten.

The scalability, rapidness, and computing are actually very good. It's a Gen9 server that we've been working with, so it is pretty good.

The benefit is that they're pretty reliable. Reliability is pretty much what we need.

There is need to improve the iLO support. There's a management part of the server that they've improved and that was a big deal.

The product is very stable and the support is very good.

Scalability is very good. We were able to move from the servers and upgrade them very easily. It has worked very nicely and is serving generation to generation over the years, so it is pretty good.

The technical support was very good. We have a pretty decent relationship; we have a four-hour onsite repair.

We've tried other products and have had some issues in the past. However, HPE has been the most reliable solution.

We have different locations; in my location, I was involved in the setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We have used IBM and Compaq back in the day.

For us, an important factor while selecting a vendor is that the actual company backing the product. We know that we're a company that has been around a long time in the industry.

You would be foolish not to be looking into HPE. A lot of their products seem very interesting and they are very useful in our field.

The server hardware is valuable and it works. It's a server platform. It's comparable to everything else on the market. It works in a pretty reliable fashion.

As a cloud service provider, we have to provide compute to customers with reliable hardware support.

I can't think of any new features I would like to see. I'm really happy with it. I know that they're moving towards OneView.

It's a server. You plug it in and it does what it is supposed to do. It’s compliant with the HPE server line because they assemble all of the drivers that they install. The drivers have typically been extremely buggy, but we removed them from our builds. I would be nice if those drivers weren't causing critical system failures every other version, but it doesn't affect us anymore.

The platform stability is good. There are some drivers that are extremely unstable.

It's a server platform, so it's not getting more or less scalable than anything else. It's not like Flexpod or other architectures.

We've called technical support for broken programs and things like that. It really depends on who you get. There are some HPE support staff who are really, really good and there are some who are atrocious. It is really hit or miss, depending on which product you call in for. For the 360s, the support has typically been pretty good and the engineers will come on site are helpful for us.

We do a lot of server cycling, every two years or so, and we evaluate it. Our work platform allows us to standardize. It's been HPE during the time when I've been here.

They used the DL client before I started. I've been with this company for four years. As a service provider, we install the product for our customers.

We are doing another evaluation cycle right now. We will be evaluating Dell, Super Micro, and UCS.

When choosing a vendor, honestly, it’s the support that I’m looking for. Everyone gets their hardware from the same couple of places in Taiwan or wherever. What really matters is being able to get the hardware delivered on time. We've actually built relationships with the manufacturers and vendors for support. If we can't get things replaced in a timely fashion, then we have to get our heads around it and say, "I know we're a five grade data center, but we may be down for another 12 hours, or whatever, because we can't get the part in". They chose HPE before I got to the company. We've continued to work with HPE because we've had a good relationship with them. Maybe 80% of our servers, our server hardware, our storage hardware, and switches, etc. are HPE.

It is solid hardware. I'd give them a list of the drivers to rip out before the builds. I've done that before, actually, because most of the drivers that I'm talking about cause hard crashes. The will cause a blue screen, and that impacts customers. Some versions are safe, and some versions are not safe.

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.