HPE Synergy Reviews

The primary use case is virtual machines. We run VMware on them and virtual servers, so applications, web servers, and things of that nature.

The solution enables us to run VDI, backups, and web platforms for our organization in a hybrid cloud environment.

It makes life easier for us when we are deploying new technology, as we have the building blocks already in place.

It will put everything all under one umbrella, when we get to the point where the majority of our systems are all on Synergy. At this point, we are only 16 or 18 frames in. However, once we get everything onto the Synergy platform, they will all be manageable under one umbrella, and it will all be standard infrastructure.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. This is primarily from the standpoint of being able to deploy new servers and machines. As requests come in, we can turn them around within a matter of a day or two because we already have the building blocks in place.

We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two.

It would be nice if the OneView umbrella could truly be one view and cover everything. Synergy has its own version of OneView. ProLiant Servers have their own version of OneView, so it truly isn't one view. We also have other platforms within HPE that aren't covered by OneView at all. We have many views instead of one view, and it would be nice if that could be resolved. That would help us a lot.

The timeliness of updates, firmware, and things of that nature needs improvement, as far as what we have to apply, and when, being able to maintain a consistent load on each one of our frames.

The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back.

We still have some questions regarding the stability of the platform.

The scalability is very good.

From a technical support standpoint, it seems as though the platform came out more quickly than the technical support behind it did. It is much easier to find good tech support people from HPE on the older product line as opposed to Synergy. Synergy is a bit more limited.

We came from a blade environment. Now, we are on Synergy. It is a continuation of a product line that we have been using for well over a decade, and it is just familiar territory.

We were already heavily into c7000 blades. Synergy is a continuation from c7000s. From our standpoint, at least from the server standpoint, the functions are basically the same. 

The c7000 blade is retiring. Synergy is the next iteration of blade servers. Synergy is the next rendition of this type of platform, and it felt like a logical fit for us to move in this direction.

We are able to deploy much more quickly than if we were running physical equipment or rack servers.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. It was just the basics that we would have expected in using a product that we were already familiar with in OneView.

We did use HPE’s Pointnext services, and our experience was okay.

We used both a reseller and HPE for our deployment. 

If I look back at the days when we were deploying physical equipment or just rack mount equipment, as needed, the product has saved us weeks.

It's a relatively new investment. If anything, it has increased our costs at this point.

We have a long standing relationship with HPE, between the technology, pricing, and so on. It was a good fit.

The HPE Synergy is a good platform, but they need to look at management and updates to make sure that they know what they are getting into.

HPE continues to make a good product. There is no doubt about that. It is a possibility that we could have jumped into this a little too early. It would have been nicer if it where a more mature product when we jumped in. Sometimes waiting a bit can be beneficial.

It increases the throughput. We had a problem with the C7000 with the down-link speed to the individual blades and what the up-link speeds were. Memory was kind of a constraint problem for us.

Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us.

One of the bigger changes is in that larger form size, we can get more things in the individual blades. We can also deal with higher thermals on the CPUs, which are all kind of significant.

We're still testing the storage device to see exactly if that's going to be useful for us or not.

The idea of taking 3PAR and directly attaching it could be compelling for us. We just have a few more things that we need to test out to see if they got fixed from the beta process.

It's mainly the fact that it gives us the next generation of the C7000, which we've been using since 2009. That gets us in that same useful pattern. The concept of virtual connect, OneView, is compelling. It extends our existing operational knowledge and gives us a longer run life with that kind of pattern. It still solves my issue with cabling and power in the data centers. It is using newer technologies which solve the issues we had with the C7000s.

One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput.

What they're coming out with initially on the road map is a 40 Gig up-link on virtual connect. That would be one of the things that we'd like. Other things that would be useful for us would be adding an AMD CPU to their product line in the 2018 time-frame.

We are currently testing stability. The beta system had some issues. They were supposed to fix them as they came up in production and we'll confirm that when we get to it.

In terms of scalability, we're happy with it in general. We look forward to what we can do with it. We believe that it should be able to replace what we've been doing with the C7000s. It mechanically would reduce the number of C7000s that we'd be running. Because we're growing, we still need to add enclosures.

We have used HPE technical support for this solution in the beta process. We were heavily tied into that. They were great. Some of the bugs that they fixed led us to another bug. But when talking to the product manager, everything that we identified as a bug has now been fixed in the GA product. We'll just confirm this later.

Before Synergy, we were using C7000s. We knew that the road map of that new technology coming in the C7000 was coming to an end.

If you're going to buy that new capacity and you're not going to fully populate the enclosures, then you need to move off C7000 and go to Synergy.

When selecting a vendor, I look for operational stability. One of the things that drove us to stay on HPE, as opposed to Cisco UCS, was the fact that UCS basically stops at the hyper-visor. HPE actually goes all the way up to the OS and beyond. If you have an issue with SQL, you can get help from HPE. You can't really get help from Cisco.

The initial setup, because it was still in beta, was complex. We discovered several bugs in the networking and bugs in the way some of the iLO functions worked. We were one of the more prolific groups in the beta program. Those issues should be fixed and we'll confirm that later.

Think about where you want to be in five years and choose the products in the Synergy family that will help you get to that point. You have a lot of options and if you just buy what is cost effective today, you may find yourself in trouble five years from now.

Our primary use case is primary compute. 

Everything is in one place. We have one place to with OneView. It provides one console with one place to get to everything. The one interface makes it easier. We have one guy who does almost everything in it.

The solution has decreased the deployment time for a new blade, saving us three hours. However, it has not decreased the deployment time for a VM.

It is very flexible.

The biggest problem that I have with it is the speed of setup.

It is very stable after the initial setup. We have flaky things, like a lot of bad fans.

We bought it half loaded with 18 blades, so we can still add 18 blades. That in itself makes it pretty scalable.

HPE doesn't have the expertise internally to set these things up.

Our previous solution was old. We were using HPE blade chassis.

We switched a year and a half ago, then again eight months ago.

The initial setup was complex. It was slow and just didn't work. Even HPE couldn't make it work for 45 days.

We use HPE Pointnext services to come out and change our bad drives.

As we move more workloads to the Synergy, then we will see more of a return on investment.

It has reduced our cost of operations by a headcount of 33 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 5 percent due to headcount.

Since Synergies are expensive, our TCO may have gone up.

We always looked at HPE. It was really a choice between a blade chassis or Synergy.

Except for the setup, everything else is fantastic. It is a really good product, but make sure you have a lot of time to set it up.

We run VMware on it, and always have. So, it is either run it on the stack or run it on Synergy, which is the same thing for us.

VMware helps us implement our business requirements more so than Synergy.

We use the solution for infrastructure and business applications. We have the mini virtualization and physical servers. We need to consolidate all the servers in one management.

The most valuable of Synergy is the architecture and hardware-software combination. There is a layer between the OS andI have used HPE C7000, Cisco UCS, and Dell PowerEdge M. the hardware. It easily manages the servers.

Using HPE Transporters instead of train switches would simplify network configuration by creating a flat network without zoning between servers and storage, fostering tighter integration.

The product is stable and redundant.

The solution is scalable with the same switches up to five frames.

I'm using tech support for compatibility and some complex configurations.

I have used HPE C7000, Cisco UCS, and Dell PowerEdge M.

The initial setup is easy.

Synergy delivers a strong ROI for more complex solutions like VMware Cloud Foundation deployments or when using six or more nodes.

You have to propose Synergy with your customer base.

It is easy to maintain the solution because InfoSight is applied to Synergy.

HPE Synergy solutions are a unified platform. However, some organizations might prefer solutions from other vendors like IBM or Cisco, depending on their specific budget and design requirements.

HPE Synergy has excellent support with mini service centers, contributing to a positive customer experience.

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

We're using Synergy primarily as a replacement for our C7000 Blade servers, which are going out-of-life.

We use VMware ESX across all of our Synergy nodes. On top of that, we have a mixture of workloads from web servers, application servers, and Microsoft SQL databases.

Using this solution has allowed me to devote more time to other tasks since the administration is so easy.

Our business needs are somewhat static, so we do not often have to implement new business requirements. However, when we have had to spin things up quickly, we were able to do that in this environment.

This solution has greatly increased the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams. We have fewer administrators working on the infrastructure, and we’ve now been able to transition a number of those people into DevOps roles.

This solution has decreased our deployment time, although I cannot give exact figures. I can say that we’ve been able to implement the Blue-Green Methodology as a result of the increased capacity that we have in the Synergy environment.

Using Synergy has reduced our cost of operations because it allows more dense placement of the virtual machines than our previous solution.

The most valuable features of this solution are the ease of management and the integration with OneView. The ease that we can allocate servers during busy times helps us to manage our IT landscape.

A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution.

I would like to see an increased variety of uplink options in the Virtual Connects.

The inclusion of these features would allow us to more easily grow our network infrastructure and accommodate future growth.

There are improvements that can be made in the area of OneView integrations and firmware, with respect to how the proper firmware versions are matched to the OneView installation that you have. 

This solution has been quite stable for us, so far. There have been a number of updates and the product is still going through a maturity cycle, so I expect that the stability will continue.

For the most part, our developers are not aware of the underlying infrastructure on which they're doing the work, but that’s probably a good thing because if they were aware then it may be for bad reasons. We’ve had a lot of success with continuous uptime on these boxes, so it’s not really noticed by our developers.

One of the reasons that we purchased Synergy is that it's easily scalable.

Technical support has been a bit of a mixed bag. When we've had issues, we've called in and sometimes it's taken a while to get to a resolution. Generally, I would say that I'm satisfied with technical support.

We have used the HPE PointNext services, and they are very knowledgeable engineers.

We were using C7000 Enclosures and some Rack Mount servers. Our existing C7000 Blade Chassis Enclosure was performing well, but it is going end-of-support so we needed something new. We did an evaluation of Synergy and we found that it fit our needs.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We used a value-added reseller and hired the HPE installation services to come with the solution. They assisted us with setting it up, and the experience was quite good.

We have seen ROI, although I do not have datapoints that I can share.

We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on. This is in addition to the VMware and Microsoft licensing for the operating systems.

Our IT infrastructure costs have not been affected by this solution. Most of our infrastructure surrounding and supporting Synergy was already purchased prior to it being set up.

We did not look outside of HPE, as we're exclusively an HPE shop on the compute side. We looked at the available offerings and wanted to make sure that they fit our needs through a proof of concept.

Synergy is definitely a solution that I would recommend for forward-thinking IT shops.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is to make sure that you do all of the available training sessions on the new technology.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

VMware is our primary use case for this solution. We run all of our production servers and non-production servers. That's what our cloud delivers virtual workloads to.

Today we're using a stateless Auto Deploy, which guarantees consistency across all of our ESX hosts, but that is only possible if we're using template-driven and standardized processes on the hardware. We can guarantee all of our network and our storage, the firmware baselines - everything is exactly the same for every system that sits within a cluster.

It has improved management of our IT landscape because we spend a lot less time dealing with inconsistencies and things like firmware and driver management.

Synergy also helps us implement new business requirements quickly. We can deploy new ESX servers faster than we could on the previous c-series blade systems.

It has positively affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team quite a bit in the last year. We spend less than a day deploying new hosts, where it would take us a week previously. So our deployment time is about one-fifth of what it was. We're able to deliver expanding capacity at a much faster rate. We're also looking to continue that into automation using OneView so that we can automate that process, rather than having an IT team handling all those steps manually.

It would typically take us about a week to deploy a new host and now we're at less than a day. So in terms of our cost of operations, given the reduction of our deployment times, down to 20 percent of the time it used to take, we're definitely saving time. That's time our engineers can spend doing other things, working on other projects and priorities.

Everything is template driven so it helps us standardize all the settings across all the many servers. On the previous HPE platform, we struggled because everything was independent. We had to manage firmware on each server, storage and network configuration on each server. Synergy is template-driven so we can ensure consistency of all of those settings. It allows us to standardize configuration and ensure consistency across the board.

A big thing for me is moving InfoSight for ProLiant into OneView, or at least connecting it. Today we have to use the iLO Amplifier Pack and that would require us to reconfigure iLO on every single one of the servers, independently, to get that data into InfoSight. We're really looking for a single control and management plane.

Also, Fibre Channel support within the Virtual Connect modules is lagging behind on the speed and the connections and configuration.

We've had quite a few issues with stability on this system, with the Gen10 blades - with memory specifically. It's been problematic.

The scalability is good for our size of company. The way we're deploying ESX and the automation that we're doing through OneView, it doesn't matter whether we're trying to add one host or ten new hosts, it takes roughly the same amount of time. So it allows us to scale much quicker than we did previously.

On a scale of one to ten, technical support is a five. We get decent support, but it could definitely be improved.

When they told us that the c7000 was being retired, we decided we didn't want to invest in a technology that had an end date. We started looking at Synergy as a replacement and started migrating to that.

The setup was pretty easy, but we did have familiarity with OneView prior to deploying it. That probably helped.

We did not use a third-party.

I'm not involved with the financials, but from a labor perspective we have definitely seen ROI by reducing the time it takes for us to deploy. We're reducing the man-hours we're spending on deploying new systems as well as on maintaining the existing ones.

We have a dual-vendor strategy, so HPE isn't the only vendor that we have. We're running Cisco and HPE, the two major vendors, and I don't think that any of the alternatives outside of those two have anything that can match the scale and ease of use of those two platforms.

Look past the upfront, initial acquisition costs. A lot of your return on the investment is going to be in labor saved, as well as driving consistency and conformity in the environment.

I rate Synergy at eight out of ten. Overall, we're pretty happy. There are minor things, like the InfoSight integration into OneView and some stability issues which are more attributed to Intel CPUs than the platform. We've been pretty happy with it. Since getting it set up, it's been very easy to manage and maintain.

For us, it is a server refresh. We moved away from c7000 Enclosures.

The Synergy environment provides us with one view. We're able to manage the entire stack, top to bottom, from that single view.

The solution helps to manage our IT landscape, especially in setting up servers quickly, and making sure that the server types are distributed in our various dealer centers. That way, it's not reinventing the wheel all the time. It also helps us reconfigure servers for specific tasks and allocate more servers during busy times.

We are able to implement new business requirements quickly. For example, we are able to make sure that we implement DR capabilities at the snap of a finger. That's something that otherwise would have taken a couple of weeks to set up. We have the requirements already documented so we just replicate to other DR centers.

As a result of the solution, our IT infrastructure is about 60 percent more efficient than it used to be. DR was a big issue for us. Also, server provisioning, especially with the approach of using server templates and profiles, speeds up the time to market for servers. That's something that otherwise would probably take a couple of days to get done. Now it's just a push of a button. We're talking about it taking seconds to a minute.

In addition, I would say Synergy has decreased our deployment time by about 80 percent and it has reduced our cost of operations

Composability.

Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly.

There is room for improvement to OneView.

We are still in implementation.

The solution is highly scalable.

On a scale of one to five, five being excellent, technical support is a four.

It was just time for a hardware refresh. We had run to the end of our hardware refresh cycle. We are an HPE shop, so we came from a c7000 to Synergy.

The initial setup was complex. It's due to understanding the environment. My team had zero knowledge about the environment so we significantly leveraged resources from the reseller. Most importantly, we depended on them to bring all the technical expertise. We then got onboard to do what we could manage.

We used a reseller. On a scale of one to five, five being excellent, our experience with the reseller was a four.

We are not there yet. We are still in implementation. There are savings but we haven't measured them yet. We know we will see ROI. In terms of TCO, it's still too early to know because we're building all the processes and everything needed to manage the environment.

We looked at Cisco UCS.

Give it a chance. Go in head-first and, as you go through the process, you'll see that the benefits start showing themselves. But you have to make sure you have good governing processes implemented before you get in there.

The lessons we have learned from using this solution include the need to have an initial idea or knowledge of how the platform should work. We learned what kind of processes we needed to put in place to manage the environment before actually deploying. We depended on the reseller to do that. Those are some of the challenges that we have gone through.

We haven't gotten too much into the hybrid cloud environment. Everything is still on-prem. However, we run discreet workloads. I think the hybrid cloud environment is the next evolution for us. Similarly, HPE’s Pointnext services will be in our next phase of implementation.

I rate it at a nine out of ten. It completely changes the way we do business and there are a lot of opportunities. It especially decreases the time to market significantly.