HPE Synergy Reviews

The wireless mounting system is excellent. We can use the monitor over the Internet and perform troubleshooting remotely with the connection to SQL. It includes a comprehensive monitoring tool. It offers many features, allowing us to update, manage, maintain, and troubleshoot the system efficiently. 

The solution should provide less frequent updates.

I have been using HPE Synergy for three years.

The product is stable. There is no issue till now and everything is running smoothly after updating the firmware.

We have the option to upgrade the server. It is very scalable. Internally, 3,000 users are using this solution. We run Internet banking; there are one million or two million users connected to the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We set up our data center and established the recovery site. There is a data tool for the third data center. The deal site is exclusively for HPE Synergy. 

ROI is good.

I recommend HPE Synergy to any organization. This product offers many good features, saves energy, provides quick support and maintenance, and includes software support. The management features are also excellent.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

• Graphical workstations
• Replacing the c7000 systems
• Analytics
• DevOps, using containers.

We bought it with the intent to replace the c7000 workstation blades. It is bigger than the workstation blades in core count, memory, and graphical capabilities. So, it has broadened us in that regard, and we have more capabilities.

It is very easy to reproduce. We have a bare metal kickstart and deployment process, which are very quick and easy. We haven't yet taken advantage of the Image Streamer capabilities of the product just yet.

• Flexibility
• iLO
• The interface to the back-end
• CPUs
• Memory
• Graphics capabilities

It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure.

We are all about graphics. I know that the Synergy has a sidecar on it, so innovation into graphics capabilities and more broadly used storage. Right now, we have 180 blades and 15 frames, but our only solution for storage is either onboard the blade itself or some network-based storage. We could probably bring some Fibre Channel into play. However, we would maybe like to see some innovation around the storage and those systems.

It still has some room to grow. For our solution, we need something between the c7000 and Synergy. Synergy is the high-end deployment, and we're still learning to how to do the composable infrastructure, so we can turn it around and make it look like this today and that tomorrow. The c7000 gave us a stable workstation remodel. We went from an Acura to a Maserati, needing something in between.

It is not very stable because of the image streaming and the issues that we had with it, which were more software-based. The hardware is very stable. The software which runs the hardware part is where we had our biggest problems with it.

It scales really well. We have 15 frames of Synergy with five racks. It has three frames per rack, so it scales really well.

On a scale of one to 10, the technical support is probably a six. It got better as we got deeper into the Tiered support. The initial support with its Tier 1 and 2 support weren't very useful or helpful at all. It was only when we engaged our Salesforce to help us get into the backdoor to talk to their Tier 3 team did we start to see things circulate.

It was communicated through to the sales team who supports us. We were looking for a replacement solution for the HPE c7000 workstation class blades, and this is what was recommended as a solution.

The initial setup was very complex. The cabling was such that it had to be done a certain way. It is one of those things that you want to not touch once it's stood up. That is our initial impression.

We did use Professional Services to help us deploy the Image Streamer and database back-end. They set it up and left. We had to reconfigure it and move it from rack to rack. That is when it broke, then we had to reengage those people again.

We have seen ROI. We have the ability to quickly compute. Instead of in the traditional way, one of the nice things that Synergy brings is that it is a big enough platform. We are putting a hypervisor on the system and carving off a portion of that to attach it to the graphics card,  then the remainder of the CPU and memory are available for virtual compute.

The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually.

When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it.

It reduced our IT infrastructure cost by a little because of the amount of capacity and it is bigger. I only have 12 blades in Synergy, where in the c7000, I had 16 blades. I lost four systems for customers in the way that we deploy systems.

We like HPE because of the technology they bring to bear. Other competitors have blade systems, but they don't have graphics enablement. HPE also has a product called RGS, which we use very heavily. That partnership alone is huge. Thus, we have a huge investment in HPE.

Ask more questions to challenge the answers that the sales community gives. We went into the product thinking that we knew the product previously. That it just needed to be a maturation of the product, and it wasn't. I would poke more technical questions at them. Sometimes, with the bleeding edge, you have to be careful. We were one of the first adopters of it, and some of the bugs were still in it when we were ready for production work, so maybe it wasn't production ready.

It is a good, stable product. It will become more mature. Ask the questions of your sales team and the technical solution architect, ensuring that it's for you. Consider the total cost of ownership, and maybe starting out simpler.

It is touted to be composable. However, we haven't used it as composable. It is more of a replacement for an existing service right now.

The deployment time stayed about the same, because we deployed the same way.

It has added value to the process. It impacted us initially when we were deploying it. We were trying to troubleshoot the problem when we should have been under production, and we were about eight months behind deployment because of it. So, it impacted us in a negative way. With total cost of ownership, once we determine how to start using the composable infrastructure, it should add to that.

We use it for public cloud right now. It covers a plethora of workloads. We have everything from the small, mom-and-pop, five-user accounting shop running QuickBooks, all the way up to data analytics running machine-learning on it.

The main improvement has been around being able to expand the environment without building out additional infrastructure. We have the blade chassis set up. We throw an extra blade in there and we've just expanded our compute and ram. It's made it much easier for us to grow the infrastructure, once we put the foundation in place.

In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity. That's really is what it comes down to. We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with it.

The solution has helped us to implement new business requirements quickly. We deployed the 8180 processor from Intel with it, which helped us empower much faster compute. We have actually been able to pick up more of those machine-learning clients.

In addition, our IT infrastructure team is more efficient. We have fewer teams, fewer people associated with it. It has also affected the productivity of our development team, now. At the beginning, they didn't know how to utilize it, but now that they've been able to bridge into it a little bit more, it's sped them up.

For example, we run our own panel and customer-interface platforms which are built in-house. They bring stats from the compute node and they bring stats from the RAM utilization into a customer portal that is API-driven. That one was always very hard because all of the infrastructure that we'd stand up was a bunch of 1Us. When a new cluster would come in, they would have to write the code for that cluster and it would take them a week or two just to put the right code together and deliver it to the customer. Now they've written it for the whole Synergy platform, so we just slide a blade in and it comes online.

The solution has also decreased our deployment time. On average, we deploy a private cloud in about two weeks: Buying the nodes, racking and stacking, and then applying VMware to it. From there we, would install the OSs, etc. We've cut out the racking and stacking. We've cut out a lot of the physical deploy time. Now, we buy the blades and put them in an open slot. The networking is already set up, the infrastructure is already set up, so it's just VMware and the OSs, which cuts us down to about 60 percent of the time it used to take.

The most valuable feature is the control of the overall solution all in one box. With it being all together, it has really taken down the complexity of a multi-environment. Switches being top of rack, storage being separate. It's moved it all into one box.

There is room for improvement in the setup.

It's stable. It hasn't given us a problem yet. No outages.

It's very scalable. We like the idea that we can put four chassis in one of our racks, and we can connect up to 25 chassis, so the scalability to us, and being able to sync all those into one management portal, is unheard of. You can't really sync that many blades and chassis together in any other platform.

Technical support is good. We had a struggle at the beginning. What happened was that we reached out and they didn't really understand what we were trying to do. We got more of the leadership from HPE involved and said, "Hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish. We're trying to set up a solution." They put some more advanced technical support in place and were able to solve it in under 24 hours. That helped us in initially setting up the solution.

Our previous solution was 1U Dell EMC equipment. We were buying new equipment. we were also buying the 1U servers from HPE. But we needed a solution which had flexibility.

The initial setup was complex. We had a couple of bright engineers working on it, and they figured out a lot of things that they don't know. They don't always have experience around certain platforms. The problem was that they couldn't find documentation easily, to walk them through setup when they just didn't know the platform.

We used a reseller, TIG. Our experience with them was great. They facilitated getting us pretty much all the information we needed.

We have seen ROI. Building it to be so powerful, we had six racks of 1 to 2U servers of Dell EMC equipment spread out throughout the data center - six racks of gear. We were able to condense down into four blades, because they are so powerful. That's a huge ROI and savings for us.

It has also reduced our cost of operations. We have fewer teams focusing on the overall solution. We have a team of two right now, compared to the team of six or seven people assigned to the whole cloud solution in the past. From an operations perspective, we're probably saving a good $150,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs, cutting out those racks. A rack costs me the square footage. Also, if I'm using a rack for my cloud, I can't sell it to a client. Moving six racks into one has saved me a ton of overhead on the infrastructure side.

In terms of TCO, I think we'll get there faster. While the blade is more expensive than a 1U-server - I'm going to buy a 1U server for $10,000 and it's going to support X number of clients - ultimately we get to the TCO faster because we're able to pack more into the density. That means our price per gig can be lower, but we make more margin on it, overall. We're able to get to that TCO faster because of the density that Synergy provides.

VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now.

We vetted out everything under the sun from the UCS side, the Cisco side, the Dell EMC side. They had new chassis coming out, chassis which hadn't been released yet, which they were showing me. 

We really landed on Synergy because it was the most flexible out of all the solutions. We were able to get the power we were looking for in the chassis. Our data center is really built on density. We can run 52 kW in a rack, but with all the other platforms we were limited on the amount of power we could push in there. We liked Synergy because we could put four chassis in, running two 8280 processors, and running 1.5 to 3 terabytes of RAM per blade, making it a super powerful, 42 to 50 kW cabinet. We couldn't do that with any other platform.

Most of the time, people look at our solution - the way we built Synergy - and they say, "Man, we don't need that much power. You built it with the highest processors you can buy, the most RAM you can put in there." I tell them it doesn't really matter, from a Synergy perspective, if you need a smaller solution, less RAM. Synergy is a good play for them, even though they don't need the powerhouse, because Synergy is a platform is solid. They could get gold processors, lower processors, put 512 of RAM in it, and the TCO for them would still be as good as we're getting.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the solution is that we should have gotten on it sooner. That is the main one. We weren't focusing heavily on our density before. Now we are. The thing we've learned is that for every new solution, whether it's storage or networking or whatever it is, we need to focus on the density side of things.

We did a big vetting of HPE's Pointnext services which helps move to the solution. We spent a ton of time on it because we really wanted to make it work. Unfortunately, since we're a service provider, the model didn't work for us, but we may use it for storage, so it could work out.

What does it not have? That's the harder question. Right now, it has everything we need. We don't really see anything, it doesn't have.

I'd rate Synergy a nine out of ten because, after it was done, it was almost perfect. It was getting it done, at the beginning, that was our biggest struggle.

Customer workloads of extensive computing

It reduced cabling overhead and increased the performance by reduced rack space.

The most valuable features are the converged network adapters.

This solution could be improved by increasing the speed on the conversion adapters. It should be 100 gigs. I would like to have bandwidth conversion on SBAs and ethernets to understand how much each physical server is consuming.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. There are a lot of server updates which require down time on each machine and each blade. The release cycle should be more frequent and offer additional features. 

We have experienced bottlenecks and set backs related to the speed of conversion adapters. There may be some limitations on scalability related to these adapters. 

The customer service for this solution is very good. We have a very good account manager and have not had any problems.

Positive

I also use Dell. I have found Dell's performance is better following the latest configurations. However, if we experience problems, HP support makes us feel more comfortable while Dell do not offer the same level of support. 

The initial setup is very simple. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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.

Our standalone servers and Windows hypervisors are running on the product.

It is a good product for hypervisors. The performance is fine.

The firmware, software, and driver levels must be improved. The product should be stabilized as soon as possible. Some hardware of the product was not in good condition. We faced some issues within six months. We requested HPE to replace them. The solution must concentrate on improving the product quality.

I have been using the solution for more than two to three years.

The tool is stable. I rate the product’s stability a seven or eight out of ten. We faced a few hardware failures.

The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. There were some limitations on some hardware. Around 8000 people use the product in my organization.

The solution provides good support. The support team will be available on-site for any new installation or configuration needs. In middle-east, HPE’s support team is far better than any other company. Support is important.

We were using a different solution before. We switched to HPE because of the support provided by them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment took one or two hours. A consultant from HPE helped us deploy the product. We needed one or two people to deploy the tool.

The license comes with the solution.

The solution is periodically making improvements. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use it for our infrastructure. We have multiple servers, therefore we use it as our main infrastructure for applications to host our servers.

We don't have a hybrid cloud environment. We use on-premise.

It has made our IT infrastructure teams more efficient. Previously, we had a standard infrastructure, which was compute, power, and storage. They had to run from one place to another to create a virtual machine. Now they can do everything in one shot.

In our old infrastructure, we had very high I/Os. Now, with Synergy, this has been reduced.

The newer technology is driving business and easing the administration process.

Synergy is a composable infrastructure. To have the ability to create:

• Workloads
• Power
• Compute
• Storage.

This is what drew us to Synergy.

With OneView, we can take care of all our servers in one dashboard.

It is very stable. We never had any issues with it.

It is highly scalable.

I have not used the technical support because I haven't had any issues.

Our infrastructure was very old. We had a lot of high I/Os. It was taking us a long time to create servers, etc. We knew that we had to change.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took us around six hours to set it up. There were no complications at all, because Synergy comes as a box. You don't have to do anything. You just have plug it into the network, and that is it. It's done.

We used a reseller, KDCC, for the deployment. They was great.

We used HPE’s Pointnext services to help move to this solution. They were great. The Professional Services of HPE were great. They came and set it up, making it an easy process.

We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 70 percent.

It costs us around $60,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent.

We looked at Dell EMC, VCE, and HPE. We went with the newest technology, which was composable infrastructure. The others were just hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would recommend the product. My team is very happy with the way the product is right now. It is an excellent product. We hadn't any issues with it.

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.