HPE Synergy Reviews

Our primary use case is data center and tech refresh/cloud.

This product is basically a step in our transformation to be more hybrid.

We are still in the transformational phase, but the benefit will definitely be the infrastructure of code components.

It does help us to manage our IT landscape with the ease of deployment through OneView.

The solution affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team with the infrastructure as code and the ease and agility to deploy.

The most valuable feature is its compatibility.

The solution has decreased our deployment time.

Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more. However, it is still a great deployment methodology overall.

In my experience, HPE has always been highly available and highly reliable. I would expect Synergy to be nothing less.

The scalability is very good. The ability to link chassis or frames together makes it simplistic, especially with the use of OneView.

I haven't had to work with technical support yet, so the product was built well.

We were using traditional HPE c7000 chassis. We needed something a bit more modernized to enable the company's transformation.

The initial setup is straightforward. The infrastructures as code enables you to fill out the configuration before you even deploy it, then it is just a one-touch deployment.

I just switched companies. My old company did not use Pointnext services. This new company does use Pointnext services, and it's a lot easier to get the hardware on demand. You don't have to worry about making those hard upfront capitol purchases.

We used ConRes for the deployment, and my experience with them has always been great.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations by at least 15 to 20 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by at least 30 percent, mainly because of the density compared to our former infrastructure.

We were looking at Nutanix, as well as the HPE Synergy. The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy. Overall, we are pleased with Synergy.

Take a serious look at Synergy.

The development team hasn't been brought into it.

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 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.

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. 

We use this solution to run both our production and non-production environments. We currently do not have any cloud initiatives, but we bought it so that we can be future protected for the cloud.

Where it used to take one week to re-image or upgrade our hosts, it can now take one day.

This solution helps us with new business requirements because we have the ability to expand or add more frames, depending on the requests from the business process.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of deploying servers, profiles, and images.

Having that single pane of glass is a good feature for the management of our environment.

The vendor needs to focus on the features that are already included and make them better.

The installation and initial setup process is complex and needs to be improved.

Once this solution is implemented, it is very stable.

One of the reasons we chose this solution is because it's highly scalable.

I don't think that the technical support for the product is there yet. I think that they're building up people to that novel technology, but there's very limited knowledge at the first and second level of support for this product.

The initial setup of this solution is complex. The interconnects would not connect and nobody knew why. It took at least forty days to complete.

We used an integrator for our deployment. We felt that they lacked in-depth knowledge of the product. They knew the service stuff, but if something went wrong then they didn't really know how to bring it back online.

I would say that we haven't seen ROI yet, but it was a way to get off of our old chassis and we had to start fresh. I would say that we will have our savings by year five.

This solution has decreased our deployment time by approximately sixty-five percent.

My advice is that if you're looking for a product that helps you save time when deploying your hosts, then this is the perfect solution. It is flexible and can handle many different workloads.

The biggest thing that I have learned from using this solution is to be patient. Once it's up and running it's great.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are providing solutions to our end customers. So I work in a distributor company, so we are still using this product and providing solutions to the store.

It's Blade Service, and this is a very agile product. It is for enterprise customers, not SMBs. Our Hyperconverged and Nimble are more suitable for SMBs or mid-market customers. Synergy is mostly for an enterprise-level business that has big requirements.

This is cloud-enabled. For example, data can be migrated from the cloud to these products. Synergy data from the public cloud can be migrated to Synergy and from Synergy to the public cloud. 

The composability is great. This infrastructure is more composable. For example, programmers are not dependent on the infrastructure team to provide service. The infrastructure is more programmable in the Synergy system. Any programmer can just run a single line of code, and a virtual machine will be ready. 

It allows for easy management. It is very simple. With a single user interface, we can manage all of Synergy.

This is a product more suited to enterprises. It's not for small companies. 

The cost is quite high. 

I've been using the solution for the last five years. 

We have between 500 and 1,000 users. They are in different regions and different areas, and therefore it is hard to estimate how many people are on the product.

The implementation was pretty fast. It's easy to manage and integrates well with everything. Sometimes integrating storage with other vendors can be a bit tricky. However, it can be done. 

This is an expensive solution. While they offer lifetime licensing, subscription options are also available. 

This is an on-premises solution that is cloud-enabled. 

If the customer requirement is more than 100 virtual machines and they are looking for virtualization and bare metal servers, then they should go for Synergy virtualization plus bare metals.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We're using it for our production server loads and for disaster recovery purposes. In terms of a hybrid-cloud environment, we use it for our database workloads. We have records management systems and dispatch systems which have critical databases which we run on these platforms.

Using the platforms along with server virtualization has made us so much more agile in bringing up environments for projects. We've been able to cut delivery times down drastically. Whereas in the past, if someone said they need a server it was going to take a week, now, we're able to do that in 30 minutes to an hour. That's one example of how the solution helps us to implement new business requirements more quickly. Having the virtualization layer over top means that now, when projects come up and they need servers, we can have those up and running within a day. In the past, it could have taken several weeks to procure the physical equipment and get it built and installed.

On a typical server build, it probably saves eight hours. In our environment, we could be building and tearing down dozens of servers a week so just do the math on that. It's hundreds of hours in savings.

When it comes to managing our IT landscape, in addition to the flexibility, maintenance activities have also been improved. Being able to maintain the hardware layer without actually impacting our users has been key for us.

Synergy also streamlines the work that our infrastructure teams have to do. They configure things once, upfront, and build deployment templates. That, along with good documentation, means any member of the team, with very little training, is able to deploy systems.

The development team is our customer. They have rapidly changing needs in terms of getting servers and environments set up quickly for them to be able to do tests; and then to be torn down afterward. The fact that it's so flexible and easy to do that speeds things up for them as well.

The flexibility to link them together and configure them gives us the ability to scale out easily, to add more compute resources as needed. With the nature of our business, we have so many projects on the go and constantly changing priorities. A lot of times we need to be able to make changes fairly quickly. The way that they're scalable and flexible means we can add additional servers in quickly. That's what is important for us. We're not spending a lot of time doing procurement and building of physical servers.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any major outages so far. We are still on some of the older BladeSystem c7000 enclosures. We're moving to Synergy although we've yet to move everything completely on to them. But so far, Synergy has been good and stable.

It's a good platform. It gives us the scalability that we need.

I haven't personally used technical support.

Synergy was just the next logical step for us, as we lifecycle out our old infrastructure. We've been using HPE technologies for 15 to 20 years. The next logical step, as our older blade enclosures reached end-of-life, was to go to the Synergy platform. We work with our HPE sales team very closely. They're more like a strategic partner for us. When they make a recommendation we take it seriously.

There was a certain level of complexity to this because this was the first time for our staff in using this platform. There was some complexity. There are different options for the interfaces for the staff. It's a little bit different than what they're used to doing on the onboard administrator for the other blade enclosure. It was a matter of getting to know the new features. They took their time to understand all the capabilities.

We did it with HPE Consultant Services. Our experience with them is always good. Very thorough. They have local resources onsite who have good knowledge of the product. They're able to answer our questions. It's always been a good experience.

The price point is a little high. We were able to get a good deal on a promotion, to go with it. It would be nice to see the prices come down a little bit.

My advice would be to set up a face-to-face meeting with the product experts from HPE. If you go through resellers or vendors that's fine, but make sure you have the HPE resources there. They know the product the best.

One of the lessons we've learned from using this solution is that you really need to take your time and learn the new features of these. There's so much. It's not just a simple blade enclosure and you plug your servers in and go. There are a lot of advanced features, with some of the composability stuff that we haven't even really scratched the surface of. The big lesson is to really learn the product and what it can do for you, because chances are it can do a lot more than what you initially think.

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.