HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

It provides support for the organization in terms of the commodity hardware as compared to the other HPE competitors. It provides stability for the servers.

There is need to always keep trying for improving this product.

Stability is better than the other alternatives that we have tried. There are always issues but typically, they are resolved very quickly.

Technical support is excellent.

Experience, knowing which vendor, which division and getting the best results are factors that affected our decision to switch solutions.

Previously, we were using Dell; we had a different vendor, i.e., a lower cost vendor at that time. The reason we switched from Dell was because we felt that the HPE solution was far superior.

The overall value, cost of keeping things running and knowing the product are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

Probably, you should evaluate the total cost of operation before you try and take orders. Check a cheaper solution.

We value the reliability of these servers.

These servers have provided good scale and performance for our environment.

• Remote management – the iLO 3 (and 4) are still lagging behind DELL in terms of features and value for money and they still do not have a HTML5 remote console.
• Firmware reporting is inconsistent – iLO provides no way of loading new firmware for devices other than the iLO itself. iLO has a very basic disk and RAID reporting with no configuration options at all.
• Out of our many HPE Proliant servers we have had very few failures outside of the common disk failures. We’ve had a few motherboards die but only a very low percentage.

We have used this solution for over three years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. These servers have been pretty stable over the years with only one or two minor firmware issues.

One issue is the way HPE do their drive cage expansion. With two 8-bay cages you need to use an SAS expander which adds cost and requires a PCI-e slot. Only the factory-ordered 25-bay model has this built-in. Other vendors such as DELL typically have the SAS expander built into the backplane which is better in my opinion.

Technical support is good. Most support tickets are handled quickly and replacement parts are generally quick to arrive. Sometimes dealing with language difficulties in their helpdesk can be problematic and often there is downtime with “please send me your logs” back and forth. Hopefully this will improve with the new iLO remote support functionality.

We have used previous HPE/HP generations since G1 as far as I can remember. We typically switch at the time of an asset refresh.

Setup was mostly straightforward, although as I mentioned, the iLO could do with providing more control, e.g. RAID/disk configuration like DELL have. Their intelligent provisioning does help a lot, particularly on their Gen9 range.

The worst part about HPE hardware is their pricing and licensing model. Prices are typically 20% higher than other vendors such as DELL and many of their advanced features are licensed separately, such as iLO advanced and Oneview, adding further cost.

We evaluated some other options. While we were purchasing a lot of HPE hardware we did consider other vendors but it isn’t always easy when you have invested in HPE tools to manage your server hardware. We have considered DELL and Lenovo.

Get multiple quotes, shop around. Keep your management/monitoring tools as vendor agnostic as possible to allow you to be more flexible in your hardware vendors.

We find it very easy to train people to use them and their reliability is very high. It’s usually cheaper than the competitor. We don't have any one vendor that we always use, so we tend to go out there and look at the best solution based on metrics such as price, quality, reliability, and HPE usually comes out on top.

Our organization itself is in bit of a transition at the moment. So we're moving towards more up-to-date solutions for our infrastructure. Anything that we do to improve reliability and availability of our services is always good from an IT point of view.

We're looking at things like UCS just now and we are looking for what would blend with our UCS deployment. I know that HPE are heavily involved in that, so it's been a lot of consultation and a lot of fun to get all of that to work together.

Stability is excellent. I've used HPE for best part of 15 years now, including all their data center solutions, and never had any problems. Any problems that do exist are quickly rectified; that's all you need.

Scalability depends on what you buy into. We are scaling out our sales, so it's a bit of legwork to get it done. There are other options to buy into more of a hyper-converged kit, but we haven't yet done that. We're looking at that kind of stuff.

We get our technical support through a third-party.

We are willing to look at anything. Just now, we do have some Dell and some Cisco kit. We tend to go with major suppliers, rather than any bespoke vendors. We certainly don't have any of the kind of model hyper-converged kit, like SimpliVity, or Nutanix. So across the board, it's either HPE or Dell. We went with HPE because their technical support is of a higher grade. You would get more reliability and better support through HPE.

I've used them for over 15 years now and all data-server solutions and there have been issues, but they have always been solved quickly. Dealing with HPE as a company is always nice to do.

In a vendor, good technical support and product reliability are key. If you ask my head of finance, it will be money. Availability, support, reliance, and reliability are absolute.

Scalability and being able to customize the service in just the way that we really want it.

The benefits are that we can customize what we want. We're able to tailor the actual service itself to our specific requirements. This is opposed to trying to get something off-the shelf which doesn't quite fit and then we have to make compromises.

I’d like to see a lower price. That's not the whole 20% difference of why I gave it an 8. One of the negative things that we find is that the configuration tools are sometimes not easy to use. That contributes to the detriment of the score.

I would rank scalability at about 80%.

I have used support. There are certain proprietary information elements which are clearly owned by HPE which are always nice to look at when troubleshooting. There are some items that we understand that they can't share. From a technical point of view, it would be nice to have more visibility and scale.

I was involved in the setup. I think our first installation was okay. When we are buying new models, sometimes the support doesn't feel like it's quite there. That might not necessarily be on the HPE side of things. This lack of support might be from some of the products that we use with it.

We go through software purchasing cycles and we know roughly when, in the lifetime, we need to purchase certain key infrastructure components. We also have the ad hoc requests where we need to get a certain per-line, server-specific, full requirements, and then we buy as we need it.

When selecting a vendor, trust is the main issue. I'd suggest others seriously consider HPE as a service solution. Our experience has been pretty positive. Based upon that I, would recommend HPE products.

We primarily use it for our own servers. Basically, we use it for anything we need to have it for, including our servers, our appliances, and virtualization.

The solution has excellent management capabilities. The iLO is very good. It's got excellent stability and provides a solid performance.

The hardware is reliable.

To deploy one server takes less than a day. You don't need too many engineers.

The solution should work to be more scalable.

The pricing of the product needs to be better. Right now, it's quite costly.

I've been using the solution for five or six years at this point. It's been a good amount of time.

The scalability varies. However, you need to buy the size, and then you are stuck up to that level for the most part. Gen8 I wouldn't describe as scalable at all as you can't get Sparx for it. The solution is changing, however. Maybe in a few years, you will be able to. However, in general, the scalability is lacking.

We have 50,000 users and they all, in one way or another, use the servers.

We plan to continue to use the solution until its end-of-life.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward.

To install one server, it takes less than a day. Most of the time there aren't any issues.

You don't need too many people to deploy the product, however, it depends on how many servers you are setting up. For a few servers, you need few engineers and no more than that.

We installed the solution ourselves. We did not need a consultant or implementor to assist us. It was handled in-house.

The hardware is expensive. It needs to be cheaper. If they could work on that a bit, it would be very helpful to customers.

We use a mix of versions, mostly Gen8 and Gen10.

We've been quite satisfied with the solution overall. It's good hardware. I'd recommend it to organizations that mostly would be using Dell or HP servers.

I'd rate the solution, on a scale from one to ten, at an eight. We've been quite satisfied with the level of performance we get, and their general stability.

ML380 ProLiant servers are really excellent servers on the ISMP side. Their performance is very highly satisfying, and it is a good product from HPE. 

On the SMP side, applying 380 servers, it can handle multiple applications and supports a virtual missions environment. It has a good memory, good power storage facility, a redundant power supply, drives, etc. It is a good product on the SMP side. 

Performance is the main feature of this product. For customers, the performance is excellent. It has been performing very well in the DL380 series interaction, and so far now, it is G10, and it is doing well. 

We use, the service comes with three year warranty with next business day support. We would like to enhance it with basic service and a better level of support. It is not required in the 380 series, but it is still widely used. So, a better option would be same day support. 

It is very stable. I can rate it as a 99.99% stable server from HPE. There is zero downtime, especially in the ProLiant 380 series.

It is highly scalable, not like the other servers. This server has a virtual capacity. We can virtualize up to 8 servers, which we have done, and it has been good. 

The scalability is very high in 380, so instead of using the high-end servers, you can use multiple servers and segregate the applications between the servers. The performance is excellent in that area.

We have used their pre-sales, HPE's pre-support services for installation and services, and even our in-house engineers can work with their tech support as well. HPE support works well within our region. They do their job within the next business day.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An investment in DL380 is worth it.

If you have to include the warranty, enhance the warranty support.

No, we were just looking at HPE.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The vendor guys should know the product well. 
2. They can recommend the right solution. HPE has a wide range of products in its portfolio. So, the vendor team must know HPE products and provide the right product to the customers.

I believe it is much easier when you are trying to install something or trying to figure out any issues with it. Even though the booting up process itself is a little bit slower, it is easier to work with the HPE 360s and 380s.

I like the way the installation process goes. It's much easier to understand what you're doing. It's easy to troubleshoot and if you are stuck with any of the hardware issues, HPE comes on site. They don't come with just one part which is affecting it, but they come with other parts as well. This makes it easy, because they don't have to make multiple visits and the solution will be repaired in just one visit.

The downtime on the systems is less frequent. If one machine is out of the cluster, we call HPE and tell them about any of the hardware defects that we have. They come up with the parts pretty quickly. The engineer who comes is really knowledgeable and knows what he or she is doing. The process is much faster.

I would like to see the booting process be a little bit faster. Instead of going through the circle loading image, it would be more interesting if it would show what it is doing during each stage of the loading process.

The HPE servers are really stable. There are hardly any issues with them. There are rarely any hardware related issues, such disk failures or a need to replace the memory on the server. They are much more stable than other servers that we have used.

We do scale and the scalability is good. We have thousands of servers.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We have multiple servers, such as from Dell, in addition to the HPE servers. We deal with both of them. My personal preference is HPE, because they are hassle free. The selection of tools is done by solution architects. I don’t take part in that process.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but from what I heard, it was pretty straightforward. It was not that complicated. If it would have been, they would have called an engineer from HPE to help us.

The solution is worth it. You should invest in it, go for it, and have fun with it.