HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

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.

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. 

The main use for the last order was for the applications and other items around an electronic fencing system.

The initial setup is very easy.

The solution scales well.

The pricing of the product is fair and not too expensive.

The product is very stable.

The solution is pretty complete, for what I have seen over the past three years. I can't recall if I've felt that any features were lacking within that time.

The technical support is pretty good, however, they could be a bit faster and more responsive.

We've been using the solution for three years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. It's worked for two or three years with no downtime whatsoever. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable.

We haven't had any issues with scaling over the time we've had the solution. If a company needs to scale, it should be able to do so relatively easily.

We have about 300 users that log into the system at any given time.

We plan to increase usage. We have to extend our electronic fencing system to our other sites, and we will likely purchase another product from ProLiant when that happens.

There's another team for technical support. The technical support is very, very good and the experience in our organization has made us interested in buying more HP ProLiant. We're quite satisfied with the level of support they give to us.

While the company hasn't used a different solution, I personally have experience with Dell. I generally prefer to use HP instead.

The implementation is not complex at all. We find the initial setup to be quite straightforward.

The product was ordered and came complete and ready to go. It was basically plug and play, so that there really wasn't a deployment period per se. We just had to power it up and check the hardware. We put in the discs and had the spare parts on hand as well. They deliver it ready to go, so it's pretty fast.

We have five individuals that handle the implementation and maintenance. They are all engineers.

I don't consider it an expensive product. We're quite happy with the pricing so far. It's reasonable.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with HP.

We're using the latest version of the solution. We purchased Gen 10 about a year or so ago.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, I would rate the product at a nine out of ten.

Our software is working on it, so it's very useful for our company. I'm not using it myself, but we are responsible for selling it together with our software.

We'd like to see better processors, better Intel processors. That's the most important for us at this moment.

Also, the disappearance of the ML150 can be a problem. So we probably have to switch to the ML110, we don't know yet. Wa are also using the DL160, so it can be a problem. And that's why we may have to switch some of our products to a workstation.

It's stable. We sometimes have problems, but globally it's working fine.

It's scalable but we are switching to workstation for some software because the CPU speed isn't fast enough anymore. For some products we were already using workstations, but for some others we now need workstations for the clock speeds.

We are OEM clients, so the support is very good. We have direct contact so support is good. We used to have 13 x 5, but now it's next business day.

When we look to work with a vendor, we look for stability. That's the most important. What is very important is that the systems are delivered on time. At this moment, that's a big problem, because of the hurricane in Houston, probably.

Also the team we're working with, because we have different countries that are ordering. It's on us to follow up on the deliveries.

The iLO. To me, its the differentiating factor of the ProLiant server and the biggest reason I'd choose to run them versus competitors. The iLO provides all the management features needed and is a consistent experience across all form factors, sizes and lines of ProLiant.

The Gen8 and Gen9 hardware provides agentless monitoring and management using the iLO, so we don't have to run agents and rely on software to get hardware alerts. These all come across directly from the iLO. OS level alerts still require agents, but all the basic hardware monitoring does not.

These predate my time with the company. I've been with the company for 10 years and the ProLiant were several generations older, so I would say we had original generation one DL 380s, so it probably goes back at least 15 years.

Very few in recent models. Most any issues are resolved with firmware and driver updates from the HPE Service Pack for ProLiant, their cross-tested bundles. On top of this, HPE has done a lot of address issues for administrators. A couple of generations ago, with the Gen8 ProLiant debut, they hit twenty different improvements that I care about as an administrator. Predictive memory enables us to know when memory is going to fail. Instead of having a hard failure or a crash in the middle of the night, it's got predictive memory so it lets us know when not to pull a drive. So if we're wanting to pull a drive for a fail-back point or something, it's got a little indicator that says "Don't pull me right now". It's got an "X" mark on it, so I don't crash a system just trying to do something preventative, but there was a wealth of different things that they added into the systems that I can appreciate as an operations guy.All of that stuff came directly from feedback of customers like me and got integrated into the next product cycle, so I'm a huge ProLiant fan.

No. You can scale-out with ProLiant, but each generation increases the memory and CPU capabilities exponentially, so from that perspective it's usually just a refresh cycle from scale discussion. But that is kind of how we approach it, is we need to increase capacity within inside of our VMware farms, we replace the hardware with a new generation, generally increase the amount of RAM and CPU configuration.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

They were dead simple. You rack them, power them on, then you can use Intelligent Provisioning to install and configure the system. They just make a lot of sense. It's easy.

I think it's the best server you can possibly buy. I have recently had more exposure to Dell and Cisco products to compare with and I stand by the DL line as the best server and it is primarily because of iLO.

The most valuable features are reliability, the ease of implementation and setup. It's all wizard-driven. Also, maintenance on the devices, spare parts availability, and, as I’ve mentioned, reliability.

We've reduced the number of physical servers, currently. So, we've brought it down from 38 servers down to about 15. Seeing that we are standardizing, it's easier to support the devices, as we don't have that many different devices on-site that need to be supported.

I looked at the technologies offered at a recent HPE conference. There are a lot of technologies that are only offered on the high-end servers. As an example, the SSD module that's embedded on the memory; that's only available on the HP DL380. We've invested quite heavily in the HP DL360 G9s, which means that I won't have access to that technology. I would like it if there's a possibility, even if you have to pay an additional license, to enable that technology on the DL360s.

There's never a problem with it. It's always running. The reliability factor's quite high.

It has definitely been stable.

On the 3PAR, you just add devices as needed.

My previous employer, we were an HP house. Then when I started at the new company, I’ve noticed that they’ve got a mixed breed of technologies. It's not all industry or first-year suppliers or brands. I started the standardization strategy and obviously, HPE was the first choice.

The most important criteria when selecting HP were performance and reliability. I've got an existing relationship with a current supplier and, like I've mentioned before, I'm familiar with the brand and the technologies.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Dell and IBM rack servers.

Absolutely HPE. Absolutely happy with it.