HPE Synergy Reviews

We have built our on-premises private cloud on top of HPE Synergy connected to 3PAR SAN storage. Our cloud was built above Hyper-V hypervisor, and that's the computing node of it.

For me, this is the best frame server technology available in the market. We can compare it to Cisco UCS. 

It is robust and stable, and it is also easy to deploy and scale. Their support is the best.

ICMs could be better in this model. When you look at its competitors, the most critical point is the throughput. HPE is the best with the ICM module, which is an interconnect module that connects the servers of the frames to the LAN and SAN. 

HPE Synergy should also support the latest processors provided by Intel.

I have been using this solution for three to four years.

It is very stable.

We didn't run it on a massive scale. We have 60 computing nodes on an eight-blades enclosure. We didn't face any issue so far.

I am not sure about the number of users, but in terms of frames, it is 200K or 200,000. We are happy with this solution. When we need more computing nodes, we will add them as HPE Synergy.

Their support is one of the best ones currently available.

Its initial setup is very easy.

We are satisfied with its price. 

My experience with them is on-premises, and it has been an outstanding experience. We are happy with HPE Synergy, and we will keep on using it. 

I would rate HPE Synergy an eight 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.

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 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.

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.

We use the solution for data centers. It supports hybrid cloud management tasks.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using HPE Synergy for over 20 years. We have the gold status partner of the solution.

Synergy is more stable than HP. I rate the solution’s stability a six or seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable. It can fit small businesses.

Whenever we call, we've got an answer.

Neutral

We have opted for Cisco.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes a week to complete. When you work with technology, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Synergy is more expensive than Cisco.

We don't find it valuable, and we don't use it; we're not profiting.

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

We use HPE Synergy for infrastructure virtualization.

It is better to build the virtualization environment in this manner. To be honest, it is flexible and powerful.

The solution's greatest strengths lie in its ability to maintain a high availability and combine networking with hyper channel connectivity into a single component.

There is always room for improvement.

Based on our use cases, I don't believe there are any additional features required.

I have been working with HPE Synergy for three years.

There are two versions of HPE Synergy, both known as Gen10. One is available only in hardware form, while the other is the Gen10 Plus, which has been recently released. However, we are currently using the 480 Gen10 version.

HPE Synergy is very stable.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

The implementation process is straightforward. It is not complex.

We had assistance from the vendor to deploy it.

The design and the physical setup are identical. As long as the configuration is done correctly, there should be no issues with operations such as patching and firmware updates.

I would rate HPE Synergy a ten out of ten.

I'm a system integrator and service delivery manager dealing with strategy. We are an HPE partner company. 

The interfusion and administration are great features that all HPE products have. I also like the flexibility including configuring the interconnects on the use of the chassis.

I find the product documentation to be disorganized; it's not intuitive and the info required for checking a specific step-by-step configuration is buried under too much literature. This could be a more robust solution with an effective internal storage portfolio for the servers. If they were to provide an end-to-end NDM product, that would be much better.

I've been using this solution for over a year. 

The solution is quite stable. 

The solution is scalable for our customers' requirements. 

In general, the technical support is pretty good but it's not the best here in India. There is a lack of knowledge, especially in the storage area. We had implementations that required some workarounds and support wasn't able to help because they were working with a specific scripted plan and didn't have enough information to deal with all aspects of the deployment. 

The initial setup is very easy and straightforward. 

Our customers are generally medium to enterprise size clients and mainly in the banking sector. HPE is currently running neck and neck with Dell but if I had to make a choice, I'd recommend HPE. If all your requirements are well-defined, pre-deployment and implementation is easy.

I rate it nine out of ten.

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 mainly use it for virtualization. We are using Generation 10 model.

The software-defined hardware might sound counter-intuitive, but it helps speed up management

Its versatility, performance, and size are most valuable. It is very decent for its size. It has very good performance and very good specifications. 

Its management interface needs some work. It is not the best in terms of management. It has decent management. Its user interface can also be better.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It is stable.

It is definitely scalable. We have about 2,000 users.

For Synergy, we haven't required support from HPE.

We were using DL ProLiant servers, and we still use them but not as our main servers. They are not blade servers. They are rack-mounted.

It was deployed by a contractor. We have a technical team of about 20 people for its maintenance.

We have already paid once. It is just the price for the permit and its use. It seems you don't have to keep paying for it, but I am not sure.

I would recommend this solution to others. We definitely plan to keep using it. It has just been around three years. We should be using it for at least six years.

I would rate HPE Synergy an eight out of ten.