HPE Synergy Reviews

Our primary use case is virtual desktop infrastructure. We use them to run VMware Horizon View for engineering applications and higher-end desktop users.

The primary workload is workstations using NVIDIA Tesla cards. It helps our engineering students to run CAD applications no matter where they are on campus, instead of having to go to a lab to do it.

The biggest example is that, instead of having to buy a bunch of workstations - 29 or 30 for a room - we can just implement 50 VDIs and students can use them anywhere. Students don't particularly like to come to a lab just to do work. They like to work collaboratively. This gives them the ability not only to do that, but it also gives them the ability to do it in a classroom. Even if they're in a regular classroom, they have access to higher-performance machines to do simulations and that kind of stuff.

In terms of our IT landscape, it's self-managing. It's self-contained. And because it's OneView, it's the same management interface as we use for the rest of the infrastructure, so I only have to learn one tool.

When it comes to implementing new business requirements, if they need more machines, or the number of students increases in that particular discipline, it's very easy to replicate our current machines. Getting things online and being able to provide those workstations is much faster. Once we have it up and running, to deploy new virtual machines there is probably a 90 percent decrease in the time needed to get them up to speed.

Also, as far as the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team goes, we don't have a lot of bodies on our team. The easier things are and the more consistent they are, the more we can do more with less.

In addition, Synergy has reduced our cost of operations. It costs less to run that infrastructure than 40 to 50 standalone workstations. I would say our total cost of ownership is decreasing.

The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want.

Set up is easy. If I need to add additional capacity, I can just slide new blades in and get the profiles from the previous ones. It's easy to expand.

I'd like to see the firmware updates, as well as the built-in OneView and imager in Composer, become a little more powerful and faster.

I would expect that newer blades that would go in it would have newer processors and be faster. It's pretty flexible with storage. There are new solutions on the storage front, that are going into it as well. I expect that portfolio to increase, just like with the rest of the solutions they have.

Other than that, I think everything's great.

It's been very stable. We've had no issues. It's been rock-solid.

It easily scales. You can put three frames in a rack and they all interconnect, so it's not an issue there.

Technical support is very good. We haven't really had to use it a lot, but the times we have had to use it, it's been very good.

We came to a point where we had to start replacing a bunch of workstations. We sat down and thought about what the best path forward would be and what flexibility we wanted in the product. Once we worked through that, this solution was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward. We've been using HPE products for a long time. We've been using blade servers for a while. We were coming off a c7000 solution, so it was really easy to understand what they were doing and just jump right in. It wasn't a big, major shift. Just an evolution to a better product.

We used a reseller - NWN. Our experience with them has been very good.

We have seen a huge ROI. Instead of having to buy 50 workstations - and we didn't have room for them, where we would need another classroom or another area - we didn't have to invest in any of that. Air conditioning was already taken care of. Power was already taken care of because it's in the data center, so we didn't need to worry about outfitting a classroom with furniture, new workstations, and everything else.

We've been an HPE shop for a long time, so we really didn't have any other vendors. We knew everything was rock-solid. It was an environment that we were comfortable with. All my staff is trained in it and it didn't make any sense for us to really look at any other product.

But honestly, I don't think there's any other product that is at that level today. Most products are probably two to three years behind. I had no problems. I was very comfortable with it.

Make sure you understand the whole solution. If you're used to doing things the old, manual way, make sure you understand what OneView does, and how it can automate and orchestrate bringing the platform up to speed, and then, what happens after that. If you do that, you'll easily see that it's a big time-saver and it's much easier to manage.

The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that it is a lot simpler than what I thought it was going to be like, when we were going to deploy.

I would rate Synergy as ten out ten because

• it's easy to use
• rock-solid
• straightforward to deploy
• easy to expand.

The primary use case is virtualized workloads. The workload are typically packages and things that run on Linux. They are just general-purpose, virtualized workloads.

Synergy is a flexible product, so it helps us to manage our IT landscape in a more simplified, structured way.

Once we get it in, it should help us implement new business requirements quickly.

Capabilities, such as, the automated updates and integration with OneView, will ultimately help us run more resilient infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the evolution of our existing HPE portfolio, the integration with our existing tool sets, and the enhanced capabilities that OneView bring.

The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient. A spreadsheet seems a bit out-of-date

So far, the stability has been good. It has been rock solid.

One of the main reasons that we have invested in Synergy was its scalability capabilities. It hooks back into the toolsets, which means you can manage vast amounts of infrastructure from one place, essentially.

We haven't had to use the technical support yet.

It was an evolutionary step for us. We have a lot of c7000 chassis, which was the precursor to Synergy. So, we used it as an evolutionary step because you could run it in blade format, as well as starting to make use of the more composable nature of it in the toolsets and features.

It has been very straightforward to set up. We have had no real problems. Even from the onset, it's helped us out with stuff quickly.

We used Tech Data for our deployment. They were very knowledgeable and quick to help us.

Our investment should return fairly swiftly.

We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff.

We looked at a composable system from Dell EMC. That was about the only one that is in the same type of league as Synergy.

Synergy is an established product, which is the main reason that we went with it. At a time, Dell EMC had just released the PowerEdge MX7000. We are a more established HPE partner already. We received a good price and have a lot of support from HPE and the partner. We also bought an HPE Nimble at the same time, as well. The two products went together quite nicely.

Take the time to understand the ecosystem and all of the capabilities, then use that to leverage further capabilities down the road.

The more that we use it, the better that we will understand it.

Virtualization is our primary use case.

The deployment time has been decreased a lot. There are fewer things to configure and that increases productivity and provides time to work on different things. Fewer resources are required and it requires less of my time. 

In terms of the productivity of our deployment team, the amount of time has been decreased a lot. In the past, to deploy one c7000 chassis with 15 or 16 blades, we literally used to spend two to three weeks. But with a Synergy, it's very quick. Within three days we can do the deployment.

Because we are bringing in and deploying things very quickly, we can go to the business and give them solutions pretty quickly. It helps us to implement new business requirements quickly.

Moreover, the number of support issues with this particular Synergy environment is way less than with c7000 so I'm very happy with that. I'm not opening as many support tickets as with the c7000. That's where it's great for our whole team.

With the decrease in support issues, there has been a decrease in our cost of operations.

The ease of deployment is the first thing that comes to mind.

I would definitely like to see them fix the firmware updates on all the blades. No matter what operating system it is running on, make sure I can do the firmware as well as the software for those firmware components at the same time. I don't want to have to rely on an external product. Let's bring that product inside the menu so that I have a better experience with updates. Firmware is a very big thing.

I would also like them to bring management of all the Synergy equipment into a single management interface, no matter where they're located.

2 years

No major outages. We have had a few small issues here and there but that's about it.

We are hitting our third Synergy rack and we are buying the fourth. You can go well with it until seven. After seven, you probably need to put another management ring in there. Other than that, it can scale and work exceptionally well.

We have gotten some very good technical support from a few guys. I even have their names. Whenever we call them, we generally get support from those two or three guys and we are happy with them.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of business requirements. When the business feels that we are a little bit late or declining, that's when we need to look into different solutions and price.

The initial setup is straightforward. I worked on it a lot for one year. Synergy is a little bit different, but I got enough training initially. In addition, HPE deployment guys were there for the initial setup. Later I did it myself.

We did it for ourselves.

ROI has been pretty good, although we're still investing a lot.

We also shortlisted Cisco and Dell. We went with HPE because we are pretty comfortable with it. The price was also competitive enough to beat them.

Look into Synergy. It's a pretty decent a product at the enterprise scale. It has all the capabilities. 

The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is that the product is really good. When we see the next iteration of the product, and that the company does a very good job of fixing issues, we really like it. That's what happened when we upgraded from c7000 to Synergy.

I would give the product about an eight out of ten. The product is pretty rock-solid. There are small issues here and there. But it has helped me to decrease my deployment time, and the number of support calls and time spent on support have been decreased a lot compared to c7000 and the issues that we were seeing with that. That's why I like it.

We use it primarily for hypervisors at the moment. We're looking at expanding into VDI, but it's primarily for hypervisors.

It gives us a lot more flexibility for spinning up new hypervisors, compared to the c7000. We use the VMM tie-in. There's a VMM OneView plugin that works really well. We do one-touch deployment for our new hypervisors.

It helps us implement new business requirements quickly. If we needed to, we could spin up a number of hypervisors pretty easily.

In terms of the efficiency of our IT infrastructure, the capacity is pretty nice. The density that we get out of it is really nice. It's a regular chassis and the blades go up to about 1.5 terabytes or so. We fill them with a terabyte. We went from two c7000s, fully-populated, to one Synergy frame, half-populated. It frees up a lot of space.

It has also decreased our deployment time. When we stood up the hypervisors from images, it probably took us about three or four hours per hypervisor. With the VMM plugin that we have with it, all four of the new hypervisors we just deployed were done in about 30 to 45 minutes. As for our cost of operations, it has reduced our power consumption, at the very least. It has also reduced the time that we would put into a c7000.

It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes.

The networking is so easy. We came from c7000s and we had to deal a lot with Virtual Connect. The new networking stuff, the new OneView solution for Synergy, is probably the best part about it. We haven't upgraded it yet, but we're looking forward to updating it and seeing how easy that is compared to the c7000.

I would like the ability to have my storage components accessed from any other frame across the backplane. If we have a storage module and we run out of space in that frame, it'd be nice to be able to share it across the frames. You can do it with hyperconverged. Why can't you do it with Synergy?

The stability is pretty good. We had a DIMM fail from ECC memory. We didn't have any outage. It just isolated it off to the side. We have the remote support set up so they opened a ticket and had a guy out to us at 7:00 in the morning.

The scalability is pretty good. I think you can take it up to something like 21 frames if you really want to. We'll never have a use for that, but it seems pretty good.

Technical support was a little busy the last couple times I've had to contact them. It was a new product. Support wasn't bad, it was just a little slow.

Our c7000s were getting old, end-of-life, and we wanted to condense. We freed up a lot of space in our data centers lately, and that was part of it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. There's a learning curve to it, just like there is with anything else. There are "ifs," "and's," and "but's," but they cabled it up for us. It was pretty straightforward after that.

We bought it through our VAR, American Digital. But most of the people who came out were from HPE directly.

We haven't really computed ROI. It was more of a lifecycle replacement that we came across.

After buying it, I don't think there are any costs other than for regular support.

We looked a little bit at Nutanix. We looked at the Cisco UCS chassis too. We went with HPE mostly due to the fact that we're already an HPE shop. We already had OneView. We were pretty happy with the c7000s. They were always solid. Synergy seemed pretty mature. I'm not a huge fan of some of the marketing around it. It works very well for what it does. They try and build it up to be things that it's not, for most people.

It's a pretty good solution depending on what your use case for it is. If you're looking for a blade system, you're looking for density, and you're looking for something that's going to be easy for your guys to spin up and get going, have a look at Synergy.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to double-check the cables that your VAR orders for you, before the product arrives. Other than that, we've been happy with the product overall. It's one of those things where when it works, it works, and there are no complaints.

I give Synergy a nine out of ten. It works really well. We've had good results with it. The only problem is, as I said, the storage module doesn't share across the frames.

We use it as a VMware host. We're a highly virtualized environment, so we run several VMs per blade.

With the new purchase, we've been able to upgrade our VMware from 5.5 to 6.7 to the newest version for hardware compatibility.

As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. We build customer in a box solutions that we ship out to casinos to manage their environments. This gives us added flexibility for building those out for customers.

The solution will affect the productivity of our development team shortly, as we have just purchased two of them for our development team to replace aging hardware. They will in production the next month and be on the same hardware. This will be a benefit for the development team to be able to develop in development on the same product, as we flip over to production.

The configurability of the cabinet is its most valuable feature.

Manageability is a lot less of a headache with OneView. The OneView profile pushing profiles out to hosts is pretty easy. It has decreased our deployment time by 50 percent.

I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources.

It has been very stable. We have no issues with the ones that we have in production.

That is something that we'll be able to test more as we put more in. However, we are definitely looking forward to managing multiple chassis in one environment.

We've had very good support. The initial setup was probably where we engaged with the most with tech support, and not a whole lot since then.

Our previous solution is just an older HPE chassis. We have multiple brands in the data center, but mainly c7000.

We needed to upgrade our hardware to be compatible with newer versions of VMware. Since we are basically an HPE shop, it was either newer blades for the c7000 chassis or a Synergy chassis. The Synergy chassis is the move of the future, which is what mainly influenced the purchase decision.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did run into a little issue with the depth of the box, so we had to order a deeper rack. That just delayed it a bit. However, we could have avoided this ahead of time if we knew that it was a bigger than a standard chassis.

We used an integrator for the deployment. They were very good. They were able to get us in contact quickly with the right people when we had questions.

Our maintenance and production times have been cut in half over our previous solutions. We don't have a lot of bodies, so saving engineer time is a valuable resource.

We don't have to spend as much time managing it, so there is a savings of 50 percent over our older existing solutions.

The biggest cost is the VMware licensing. 

In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000.

It was pretty much between Dell EMC and HPE. We are an HPE shop, and the Synergy chassis and the Dell EMC offering were pretty similar, so there was no real reason to change.

It is worth a good hard look. I like the options which are available for the different slots, as opposed to just straight blades. It provides a lot of flexibility, and if that's what you're looking for, then you will definitely like it.

We really haven't had any issues, other than size. Everybody has been going that way anyhow, so that is nothing bad. It's been a powerful system and reliable, so far.

Account for the size and make sure that you have the proper space in the rack, then everything else will be fine.

The solution has affected our TCO by saving us in man-hours. As far as physical licensing, power, heat, and cooling, it is all pretty much the same.

I'm using the solution for managing cloud infrastructure for data centers. We are using it to manage the center. We manage and store data over there. We use it for RMCV and RMCVO.

It connects with VMware and helps us manage VMware data storage. 

It's cloud-based.

It gives a lot of flexibility for managing data storage. There are a lot of options and places where we can manage the entire infrastructure, from virtual machines to storage devices.

OneView is also a part of the product, which is useful. It's part of the infrastructure. 

It's very useful in the process of restoring data. 

The initial setup is fine. 

It has plug-ins with VMware and vCenter infrastructure. It's easy to manage the VMware cloud-based infrastructure and VMware.

There is an HP plugin we need to enable in vCenter for RMCV backups. Sometimes we observe that the data storing is not happening correctly. It's like that data store, whatever we have added in Synergy, takes a backup in a day. Sometimes we observe that the backup is not happening properly. We used to get alert emails that the backup was failing for the particular storage. In that case, we needed to do a restoration during that time. It would give us a lot of trouble to restore the VM from a particular backup.

There is no expertise. There is a lack of expertise at an acceptable level from the technical teams. We need very senior higher-level technical teams to come in in the future. 

It takes a lot of time to analyze the logs.

In the Generation 10 modules, we have observed that very often the server has hardware issues. We have to frequently contact the vendors. 

I've used the solution for one and a half years. 

It's a stable, reliable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is fine. We can increase the sizes of the test stores.

I'd rate the solution 6.5 out of ten in terms of scalability.

We have hundreds of people on the product right now. 

Technical support could be better. 

Neutral

It is easy to set up the solution. 

The deployment did not take very long. It just takes a couple of days to set up the infrastructure.

The installation may take some time. You have to plug in all of these things and do fail testing, et cetera. We did use Oracle databases and sometimes they might fail. The snapshot and remote snapshot, for example, were not happening on time. That takes time in terms of resolving those issues if they come up. You might have to run a script for contact support.

We handled the initial setup process ourselves. 

We pay about £500 for the solution. I'm not aware of the exact licensing terms. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

I would advise people to try the solution. It is easy to manage. That said, in order to manage HPE Synergy Servers, you'll want to install OneView.

I'd rate the product seven out of ten.

Our company has 2,000 developers who use the solution for integration with OneView to manage servers and enclosures. 

We have multiple racks set up with different platform servers like DL, C7K, and Synergy. At least three enclosures are linked together in Synergy which is a prerequisite.  

We set up multiple blade servers, install ESXi hosts, and add the blade servers to VMware as a host. We manage our 30-40 ESXi hosts through vCenter which is private. From there, we test and develop products that will be used in the vCenter application. OneView integrates with vCenter to manage resources. 

The i3S module can be configured to provision storage to all blade servers and boot to any operating system without needing local hard drives. The module  handles configuration for repositories and bootable iOS images so costs are minimized. The module is quite good and very cost effective for production. 

The solution has great architecture and functionality. 

The solution should support Cisco or other vendor interconnect models. Our previous platform supported extenders and interconnects. 

A lower price model should be offered so customers at every level can use the solution. This would allow businesses to grow their data centers and be more competitive with Dell and Cisco. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is highly scalable. We can connect multiple enclosures together and increase the number of hosts or blade servers with no issues. 

We contacted support with issues connecting to the internet and updating features. They were very helpful and provided solutions. A chat option is also available and useful. 

Support is rated an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is easy and everything you need is preloaded. Deployment takes a two or three hours and includes configurations. 

We implemented the solution in-house. A system administrator can repair any items that go bad during setup. The solution is not hard to manage with some experience.

The cost is high or a big investment and that is a drawback for some customers.

A one-time investment of $80,000 to $100,000 is needed for high-end servers that are very stable. If these are your needs, the investment is worth it. 

I recommend using the solution and rate it an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for processing our analytics platform. The solution enables us to do all of our analytic workflows in a hybrid cloud environment.

The processing time has been about 50 times faster and allows us to do AI models.

The solution has helped us implement new business requirements quickly with new audience requests because Synergy's compute power when combined with 3PAR has been really terrific.

We have had very low infrastructure requirements because of its simple setup. It has helped us dramatically improve our SLAs.

The manageability is its most valuable feature. It is a fully managed platform, which is very simple to manage. It lets us set up servers quickly.

It allows us to have better throughput.

I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure.

Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent.

So far, it has been very stable. We've only had to reboot it once.

We like the scalability. being able to drop new nodes into the rack.

The technical support has been very good. 

Our old solution was too slow, and we were at risk of losing client jobs.

I would have purchased the product sooner, but it didn't exist.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there.

We used an HPE partner for the deployment. They were terrific.

We have absolutely seen ROI: The number of jobs processed and being able to process jobs within the allotted time frame, so we have not lost any jobs. Thus, the solution has certainly paid for itself.

The solution decreased our deployment time. It only took 10 percent of the time.

We outright purchased Synergy. 

Our TCO has been affected by five percent.

HPE and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We chose HPE Synergy because it was the superior solution.

It handles everything that we are looking to do.

Consider using it in conjunction with Nimble.

Biggest lesson learned: Be more on top of what HPE products and solutions are available.