HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

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.

Our primary use for this product is our electronic faxing system. We have a number of applications that are hosted on it, working together.

The technical support could be a little faster.

We have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for three years. We started using the most recent version, Gen10, a year ago.

We have had our system working for between two and three years with no downtime. We plan to continue using it in the future.

We have about 300 end-users who log into the system to use our applications.

We have to extend our electronic access system for our sites, and we will be purchasing another ProLiant.

There is another team in our company who deals with technical support, and they have a lot of experience with the product. I can say that the support is very good, although it would be better if it were quicker.

We also have a similar solution by Dell, and I find that the ProLiant support is much better.

The initial setup is very easy. The ProLiant was complete, and we just had to plug it into power and check the hardware. We did not have to put in new parts, such as additional hard disks. They are made to order.

We have four or five engineers for maintenance.

This product is within our budget.

In summary, this is a good product and I can recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

My primary use of this solution is for mathematical models that we develop and buy. The mathematical models are being bought from companies like Siemens, General Electric, SMS, and DMAC Group. Primarily these companies give us this software, we buy it from them, they make mathematical models for steel plants and we also make our own models.  

I also have around 40 portals that I'm running on that I had developed and maintained. I use the DL servers to host the databases and the portal.

We make steel and the manufacturing also requires software. These servers are the ones that we prefer. Since the beginning, we were tied with HPE and I have an annual maintenance contract for all of my servers. I have around 3,000 computers, 800 are servers including Alphas, from HPE. I have very few Dell EMC servers. I don't prefer Dell EMC primarily because the availability of the service engineer is not like HPE. It's not weird that Dell or IBM servers are not as good as HPE. Because I have the facility, the advantage of HPE is that they have been here since the beginning and so I prefer HPE. Since it's distributed across India, a very large area of almost 30 other square kilometers, I cannot house every one of them in one common platform. All of my Oracle lower databases or HPE server databases and all of the software I've accepted all the Alphas and even I use Windows platform operating systems. These particular servers have served very well.

Stability and a lower failure rate are the most valuable features.

I would like to see more of a hard drive base.

IT keeps on changing the versions of their products. There have historically been great differences in time than when the G server, the Gen8, nine, and now 10 generations of DL ProLiant server have been available, the time differences are much less. Specifically for G9, G10 even less than one year, now there is no way people like us will keep on upgrading servers without having proper ROI. HPE needs to allow us to replace the CTUs of a higher generation.

It is quite stable. They do not fail easy.

DL3 is not scalable. You cannot scale them versus replace scalable hardware, like going to Itanium servers. 

I have not needed to contact their technical support. 

We also looked at Dell EMC and IBM. The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, apart from costs, is service. Service will ensure stability. 

I would rate them eight, primarily because of the service that they provide and stability that the hardware gives.

For any other person who wants to buy any hardware, the first thing that he should look for is who is going to support him locally. He should then evaluate cases of the availability of that particular vendor's hardware. Buying any such systems is not a big task. He should see if he can maintain these servers in the long run. By long run, think ten years. He should be comfortable with the people that are going to help maintain and comfortable with the equipment that he's going to buy.

The most valuable feature is consistency to the cost. We understand what we're going to get, and we also understand the price-point that we're entering into.

Some of the features I'm already seeing over there, i.e., really moving more towards a software layer that helps us to manage the infrastructure that we're purchasing from HPE. To use a competitor's term, as to what Nutanix is doing, HPE should be moving in a similar direction, which they are now, both in regards to a free product and a paid product; I'm actually very happy about that.

We've been using the HPE Proliant DL380s for seven years or more, and the DL580s only during the last year.

The product has been consistently stable. We have had no issues.

Scalability with the hardware alone requires a bit more than just hardware, but we are using it in a scalable architecture. If you look at what we do with our EBS system, we use the DL580s with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to allow it to scale.

The technical support is very good. We recently just had to use it and the items were resolved in a timely manner, so I've been happy with the support.

With some of the new software changes, the setup is getting easier and more consistent for us to apply across the globe; it's improving for sure.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the costs and then, the other long-term factors such as reliability and quality.

We do actually evaluate solutions every year. We still buy other servers but not as many as we buy from HPE. Still, we do buy some stuff from Dell, just because we're in three regions of the world, but most of our stuff goes through HPE.

We're a bit of an HPE shop. We've used Dell in other places, too, but generally, in terms of the price-point and quality of service it has always led us to HPE, so these are the main driving points for us.

For companies like us, we want more than a server. When we buy servers then we want some level of software orchestration on top of it to help us deploy OS or hypervisor plus some form of high-level capacity/environment review. This is sort of happening with Generation nine and ten hardware but not as refined as what you get with Nutanix.

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 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.

I would say it's well documented and you can find exactly what the configuration is easily as well as the drivers and other documentation that they require to get a junior staff member up and running on the platform.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

I would say that for us, as we're moving to more of a cloud based solution, we're looking for ways that you can take machines that you can't put in a private cloud instance and how those can be managed from a single user interface.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't break.

This is something that we're going into right now with HP as we've built out a stack of these machines. In the future we're planning on moving to more of a cloud based architecture.

They want to add more sites and it's just not good for us to add in another rack of equipment for every site.

Technical support gets to the parts where we need it. Like any product, it fails occasionally, right? But we built the system to survive and HP is still there to support us.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Work with HP to pilot before you go buy it.

Most valuable for us are ease of use, the ability to quickly view the system for health and how to get into the consols.

It reduces the amount of work that we have to do. In the old days we used to have to go downstairs and basically plug into a computer and do stuff like that. Now, we're at our desk and we just walk right up to a computer and if you know something is going on you can easily open the case with HP and have them come out and take a look at it.

I can't think of anything right now regarding improvements except perhaps the price. I think more involvement with us, the customer would be good too. They are doing better with that now though. We've had meetings with them and we really discussed the problems that we've come across. I'd say we're going in the right direction, that's for sure.

Stability is definitely encouraging. The other system was weak. We had a lot of problems with the memory. The memory would go out every time we did a patch. We'd have to reboot the server and as it came back up, 10 percent of the time, we'd have a memory issue but over the last year or two, it's been much improved.

Scalability is pretty good. I'd say it's a lot better than it used to be, definitely.

The technical support is very good. There's always somebody available. We have an on-call number.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

Mostly we look at reliability, maintenance and support. Those are the big ones to consider when choosing a vendor. Since we have a relationship with HP, that's it regarding any alternative vendors.

As I said earlier, look at their maintenance support. The number of companies that they actually support. Those are big factors. And disaster recovery. That's what I would say.