HPE Synergy Reviews

We're doing a new product line, we're now doing Big Data. We had the help of HPE on it. They advised we use this platform, so that's why we have it.

Shorter delivery times. Where we now have a delivery time of about six weeks, we hope to go back to days.

It's a bit easier to manage than the C7000s. But we're still finding out how it works, it's all new to us. And we're also using it for new concepts, the old systems we used were ESX. And these systems are used for Mesosphere and bare metal Red Hat deployments.

The deployment time of a system through OneView is pretty slow, but apparently that's being addressed in an upcoming update.

Also not a big point. It's stable, but all the other solutions we have are stable as well, so this is not a main point.

The other solutions that we have are scalable as well. At least they are scalable enough for our needs.

Good, very good. As far as we have a need for them, they are knowledgeable.

It was pretty complex. We weren't allowed to do the setup ourselves, we had to have an engineer from HPE. In my book, that's complex, if I cannot do it myself.

The density and the flexibility that it provides are the most valuable features. In the C7000, there was a memory density issue per-blade that was solved in Synergy's platform. On top of that, I value the composability of it. In other words, being able to create hyper-converged systems within the frame, rather than having to resort to rack mounts.

A great benefit is being able to create different solutions that aren't available in the traditional C7000 platform.

It's a lot more about some of the speeds and feeds, such as the 25, 50, 100 GB virtual connections. In addition, I would like to see improvement in the 32 GB fiber channel connection at the end of it.

We have no issues with stability.

I have not used technical support.

It's just one of those products that as a partner, we have always tried to stay on top of. Previously, we had the C7000, plus other competing products, in our lab.

When selecting a vendor, I look at how well things integrate together, as well as the ease of management.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We didn’t look at any competitor’s solutions.

Look at the flexibility of the platform, as far as being able to have that storage drive to be able to do hyper-converge. It should not block your architecture. As you scale it out, you don’t have choke points on the network side, like you do in other platforms.

I don't remember the models. However, there are Synergy nodes built in the cloud infrastructure with a design utilization. Some of the project was within two Synergy baskets with a full load installed.

The solution is stable. 

We didn't have any problems handling the initial setup.

You can scale the product.

Support is very helpful.

Maybe two years before, there were issues with drivers. However, the issues were always fixed quickly.

They were not so deep into integration with VMware. As a partner of VMware, I'm focused more on VMware products and I don't remember many details about HPE now that time has passed. However, there should be more integration. 

I used the solution for a while. I worked as a partner in a big integrated company, and we did some projects for this technology with this recruitment.

The solution is stable and reliable. There were no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale. We started one project from one basket and we added a second basket without any problems.

Technical support has been knowledgeable. Everybody is excellent.

Positive

I don't remember any problems handling the initial setup. Everything was described and really detailed in the documentation. 

We work with a really small team. Two guys handled the deployment and maintenance. It's not necessary to have a huge team to deploy and run the production.

We had help from the local HPE office. If we had any questions, we were able to ask the technical guys from the local HPE office. I don't remember if we had any really big issues.

I worked with the technology and never handled the licensing aspect. I'm not sure of the exact costs. 

Whether or not this is the right solution for a company depends on the use case. It's not really for everyone. I don't really want to recommend it to everyone. For some cases, it's a really good solution. For other cases with a high-density environment, it's not ideal.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We give out certification training on HPE product lines. Synergy is one of the product lines. It's part of our composable infrastructure in our hybrid IT training. We use Synergy for giving customers and partners hands-on experience.

It gets us lots of training-development work because the product is changing all the time. It's a relatively new product. It was introduced a couple of years ago and it's changing quite rapidly. That's a benefit for us as we continue to update the training of it.

The key advantage that we teach people is speed to market, or speed to productivity, thus, reducing the time it takes to provision business services. That's the key positive aspect of Synergy.

Composability. We're developing training. We show our partners the value of composability and how it can meet their needs.

I would just like it to work.

The stability is poor. It's a relatively young product and the management solution that drives the product shows its signs of immaturity. There is a new version being released this week. Things are getting better but they need to get better more quickly.

From a scalability perspective, the platform is great.

Technical support is poor. We've had issues with the system. Firmware upgrades, for example, did not go as they should have gone. After placing a support call to HPE, several weeks later problems actually got worse as a result of what they instructed us to do.

We were shipped the very early solution and it's installed in a data center in Michigan and we had other people do it. We helped them do it remotely but it wasn't hands-on for us. The kit is owned by HPE but it's managed by an external company and we work with that external company to use the kit and help set it up. Our experience with them during the setup was great.

The main challenge we faced was that when it was installed it just did not work. There were faulty components and it took weeks of troubleshooting to find the faulty components, get them replaced. Getting help from HPE was difficult. Nobody knew about the product. It was a brand-new product and people had not been trained on it. That part was not a great experience.

The setup was very complex. The intention for Synergy is that it's auto-discovery. You turn the power on and everything happens and it's all done for you. It absolutely did not work that way. If you have one faulty component - and we had several - it just does not do what it says on the tin. Again, it was an early production model, so we understand things go wrong. But again, getting support for the product was very difficult because nobody knew about the product because it was brand-new.

Come on a training course. Find out what it can do for you.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that composability is the way to go. No one else can do it. It will be a great win for HPE when it works.

It decreases deployment time, certainly, when it works. I can get an operating system or a hypervisor deployed within five minutes. Whereas prior, it might have taken me five hours to do the same job. It's quite significant. What we don't see are the 700 hours that we have to spend setting it up and getting past the bugs in the software to make it work. When it's working its fine. I don't tell customers this. However, it is marketed as a panacea and, with the appropriate work, it can be.

I rate Synergy at five out of ten. Once they resolve the issues, it'll be great. The product is only two years old. In another year, another two years maybe, it'll be fantastic. It's just, the reality is, it's breaking new ground. No one else has this solution and there are issues with it. It's possible that much of the skill that was within HPE as a company, is no longer with the company. As a result of people moving away from the company, HPE is left with insufficient expertise, especially in the support area.

In the data center, you see customers with a lot of blade enclosures and a lot of servers, and this solution works fine.

I have one customer in Belgium that I know that is testing it, and they're quite happy about it. There are some challenges, but it is software. For software, you have developers.

The hardware is there.

With the changing IT demands, they need to change more often and faster. We need applications to model tomorrow’s needs. We need more applications for changing users. There is a need for a more optimized infrastructure.

For instance, I have a customer with 20 blade enclosures. In those 20 blade enclosures, there are 40 management modules that you need to update and manage.

In troubleshooting, you have to determine if the issue is in one, two, or in all 20 modules. The diagnosis is harder.

With Synergy, we only have two management modules instead of 40. It's an efficiency thing that needs to be improved.

We'll see what will come next. We will probably see other types of enclosures, smaller or larger ones, and more options on the storage and networking side. This is the typical evolution of IT to go to more and faster.

Synergy is new, but the advantage is that technically, it's a ProLiant server, so it is stable. Proven technology with a lot of new features.

HPE has proven track records worldwide delivering superb support on hard- and software. This is the same for Synergy.

One of my things I do in my company is write technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have.

I don't have a Synergy enclosure yet in my home lab, a.k.a., data center in my garage, but I'm quite sure that it is simple enough that my nine-year old daughter could install it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, "we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it.

I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

We are primarily using this product to build a private cloud infrastructure.

While it is difficult for me to state how the product has improved my organization without making use of a comparative frame of reference, I can state that it has enabled us to centralize all administrative tasks. 

What I find most valuable about this product are the number of interface combinations made possible with a single computer node. Secondly, I would rate the ease of configuration.

As concerns room for improvement, the number of levers in the system should be addressed. Technical solutions should be made easier. The advice I would give is that HPE Synergy increase the availability of the deployment. 

We have been using the product for one year.

I have not been using high speed for long enough to give an adequate rating of the product's stability. 

I consider this product extremely scalable. A single view allows for tremendous management capabilities. 

I have had to make use of technical support for one or two problems concerning product deployment. I had to instruct them to use their headphones. Only at this point did they give me results and they were not good. I had to request to be escalated and this was time consuming. The last issue for which I had to turn to technical support involved the apparent loss of a compute node on one of the computers. 

Previously, we used an IBM Blade Server and, subsequently, the IBM system. 

The initial setup was complex and this can take around three weeks to a month. 

I do integration on behalf of the customer. 

I cannot properly advise on setup, pricing or licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options before settling on HPE Synergy and, besides, this decision was not in my purview to make. 

The entire company and all its customers are utilizing this product. Plans are in place for future upgrades. 

I would rate HPE Synergy an eight out of ten. 

We use the Synergy Frame to host the main infrastructure for a big project. We have multiple Synergy Frames that are all managed by a single OneView interface.

The uptime and the performance meet our expectations, plus the integration with 3PAR is very good.

The OneView installed on the Composers has a very friendly user interface, which helps to manage the compute modules in the frame, compared to management used in legacy technologies.

The Online firmware update for the virtual connects has minimized our downtime windows.

The features we found most valuable are:

• Using only two virtual connect modules to support network for multiple frames
• Ease of management using the OneView Composer
• Online firmware update for the Virtual Connects, which are part of a single logical interconnect module

The OneView has improved a lot throughout the years with the release of the Synergy and OneView version 4, although it still has issues. The stability and smoothness of firmware upgrades for the compute modules can be improved by enabling full composability of the Synergy Frame.

We have been using this solution for two years.

This solution is very stable.

Our impression of the scalability is very good in terms of Composer and virtual connects, since you need only two of each for multiple frames.

Technical support for this solution has a very good initial response; however, escalation takes time, and most of the time the first level of support cannot solve your case.

We used a different solution previously, but we switched because of the ease of management, and in addition, this solution is future proof.

The initial setup is done by a partner and it is straightforward, but it takes time.

Our deployment was handled by a Vendor Team, and they are very experienced.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution, including Dell PowerEdge M1000e and Cisco UCS.

My suggestion is to go with HPE Synergy Composer v2 once it is released. 

Have HPE support with you while doing hardware upgrades.

As far as I know, the traditional blade system is not going to be supported from 2023. So we are trying to anticipate the need for this change towards Synergy, and perhaps moving a little bit early.

• They're easy to swap and move around the datacenter, for sure. 
• They don't occupy too much space for what they offer.

The structure is different yet similar because it resembles the traditional approach of blade systems. Perhaps it's more composable, you can use storage as well as compute blades. So maybe it's more versatile compared to the traditional blade systems.

From what I've seen, it's got pretty much what I think we need. Maybe after a little usage I can come up with new ideas, but right now it seems okay.

The possibility of using storage directly in the frame in order to have bigger storage directly there, and not having an attached storage like SAN or NAS. That would be helpful.

It will probably be with us for a lot of years to come. We are still in the process of buying the first one, so maybe we're not going to use the full ring architecture from the beginning, but in the future, since we're going to have just Synergy and not the old blade systems, it's definitely a possibility.

I don't know about the tech support. We have a consultant. There is a specific person that follows us and tries to help us in our needs.