HPE Synergy Reviews

It's an HCI solution. I've also used it for on-prem and GreenLake solutions for consumption model requirements.

It's typically for enterprise solutions that are multi-data centers and multi-sites. There are several Synergy frames.

The hyper-converged infrastructure where everything is stateless is valuable. Basically, you have your compute storage and networking management.

Gen 11 is being released. That's going to have a lot of advantages over Gen 10 and previous generations in terms of the cooling modules in the servers to keep them cooler and run with more efficiency and better performance. There are more management features with iLO 6 and the latest OneView management.

In terms of additional features, I've been requesting SimpliVity to be running on a compute module versus a 1U and 2U.

I've been using it since the C7000 in 2019. 

We've seen an ROI.

It's easier to consolidate standard tier-three infrastructure into an HCI solution.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of HPE Synergy is for invoicing. Our Brazil office uses the solution as we do not have Oracle ERP there. It is a legacy system.

HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years. Our offices in Brazil do not want to change.

There really isn't any valuable feature. Our team in Brazil does not want to change, and that is why it's still running there. They have not improved their product since it was purchased. I would like to see the product be compatible with Oracle invoicing or Salesforce invoicing.

HPE Synergy should be easier to use and integrate with other databases like Tableau and with the cloud. It is difficult to integrate with cloud-based data sets. I also would like to see better customization ability.

I have been using HPE Synergy for 15 years.

The solution is stable. It has been running for 15 years.

HPE Synergy is not scalable. If you have a bigger workload or have more invoices, it is not scalable. You need to stay within a certain capacity. We have over 150 users from payroll and accounting using this product.

HPE Synergy supports the product, but not in terms of enhancing the product. I would rate customer service and support a four out of five.

Neutral

I worked with Oracle and Salesforce. Both of those solutions are easy to customize to the needs of each of our organization's structures. They each have some unique needs. Oracle and Salesforce are ready to provide those types of customizations quickly. HPE Synergy does not accommodate these types of customizations.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using it for SQL servers on HPE servers. We use the service across the company. We are in three countries. It serves all our users.

All our internal applications are on an SQL server. It improves performance when we use all applications on this one server.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly with some app deployments.

Compatibility and scalability are its most valuable features.

You set it up and forget about it.

I would like more storage with this solution, because we still need 3PAR or other storage outside the box for the amount of data that we have.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very good, but I'm still trying to scale more than I already have.

The technical support is remarkable and very good.

We have a policy of server renewal every three to five years, so we changed all of blade servers to Synergy.

We, as a company, need to know more about the solution, because I know there is a lot of software included that we are not using. I would like the solution to provide training, so we could be more knowledgeable about what is included.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was pretty easy to start up and use it.

We used a Mexican integrator/reseller for the deployment, who was very good. They are one of my best suppliers.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent.

Top of the list was HPE. I didn't consider any other vendors.

The solution is pretty good and very stable. It has a great support. It works as the brochure says, "It works perfectly." 

We need to learn about the all the solutions that integrate well with Synergy. E.g., it has a monitoring solution that we need to explore.

We also use Hyper-V. So, we are already using physical servers to run it.

The primary use case would be our virtualization platforms, ranging from our presentation layers to just commodity workloads. 

I don't know that we're too much focused on hybrid cloud just yet, since we're a service provider. A lot of our clients are paying us to host their workloads. It's not like we're running our own IT and putting it in the cloud, as well. However, as we do move things there, these workloads are probably the ones that are most opportune to move to the public cloud. So, it would generate a hybrid scenario, as these are Citrix presentation systems, and also Windows and Linux VMs, which can move back and forth.

It has improved our procurement and day zero provisioning. We are bringing in racks of Synergy which are not populated with the blades, then we are buying the blades and populating them, as our business needs. This has been pretty helpful to be able to sort of pre-package the data center with the Synergy platform, then deploy servers into it as we grow.

The solution has driven us to use the OneView platform and have more alignment with HPE's strategic directions. We are still learning what that means to us, but at least it has put us in better alignment with where HPE is at. When we do find something that doesn't work, they are incentivized to fix it better than if we weren't aligned with their vision.

Synergy has actually challenged us to rethink how our IT infrastructure teams are structured. So, we're still dealing with that. Our hope is that by having OneView, Synergy, and software-defined that we will realize the value statement over time.

So far, the solution has helped us implement our new business requirements quickly. Synergy has the ability to have everything pre-packaged and being able to slide blades in. That is what we have always liked about blade architectures: We can slide a blade in, or if we need to move it, we can go move it somewhere else. There is less cabling to deal with, etc. It is one of the attractive things of the platform that we first got excited about it.

We bought in pretty early to the composability story and being able to software-define the compute. We are realizing a fair amount of that. 

It has been in the external integrations to other platforms that we have, which aren't HPE, where some of our challenges have been. We are still working on these.

I would like to see some integrations with non-HPE platforms. The Synergy platform is working pretty well in most cases. It does what it is advertised to do. Integrating it into our larger environment that is not HPE products has been somewhat of our challenge. I would challenge HPE to go fix and address these gaps. Have a story there, because not everybody will run HPE throughout their entire data center. I have other suppliers in there, and they have to work together.

What we are observing is to upgrade a whole rack of Synergy, so four frames when it's fully loaded, we are spending about 50 human hours doing that. There is a lot of work time and wait time in there. Overall, this work effort is spread across a bunch of people and the total time is about 50 hours. I don't know what percent increase that necessarily is, but it is a lot of work that we didn't do before. So, it feels like a big increase. That is still us rationalizing how the platform should be maintained.

I would like something that makes it even easier for developers to leverage OneView. It is all API driven. However, if you are using the web GUI that is OneView, you can't get any feedback about, "If I click this button, that button, or that button, before I hit go..." Show me what the API call is. Help me develop code faster if I am not a developer who wants to go read the whole API guide. Help me point, click, and start to develop code incrementally.

Stability-wise, it has been pretty good. When we are doing maintenance events. we have had some hiccups. We have definitely lost redundancy. There was one incident where we had everything go down. For the most part, what we are observing is the redundancy in the platform is working reasonably well. With the upgrades, we are just losing redundancy. 

We're not expecting it to go down. Our expectation is we will run our workload 100 percent of time, even while we're upgrading the platform. In some instances, that's happened, and in the ones that it hasn't, it is definitely a bug that the HPE team is trying to address.

We haven't hit the scale edge of it yet. However, we like what the solution says it will do. There have been some instances where we have overrun some of the software scaling, even without being at a massive hardware scale yet in the network space inside of Synergy. They are working on this, and it is something that we hope will continue.

We often find ourselves having to get into the Tier 2 and 3 support or into the development teams. Based on our scale, and what we do with this platform and others, we tend to find more bugs that are edge cases for most other people. Therefore, Tier 1 support is of little interest to us. However, when we have gotten to the right people, the technical support has been really good.

They stopped selling the old solution. We were using the c7000 blade infrastructure from HPE.

There were other things that we could have tried to do to wire up our environment differently. Having more simplistic cabling, being able to pre-stage frames, and slide servers is the experience that we desire to have. However, if it doesn't work with the other suppliers in my data center, then the experience quickly stops mattering.

Our environment is very complex. That had a fair amount of bearing on deploying this platform. The OneView tool promises to make things simpler. Sometimes, it overlooks some of the really edge cases of the configuration to make things simpler, and that's what we found. There would be another tool to go to behind the scenes to go do what we need to do or troubleshoot. So, we have challenged the HPE team: "OneView should be the one thing to go to. There should not be something else behind it, telling me to go login here, but rejecting me because I don't have that username and password, then making me call support to login." We don't like that.

We worked directly with HPE. Our experience with them was good. They came to the table and really worked with us. We generated a lot of bug tickets and issues, so we had a lot of really challenging conversations. However, the fact that they were there to have those conversations is why we wanted them.

HPE has brought people to bear for the project that would likely have come out of a Pointnext engagement in other cases. However, we haven't directly done something with Pointnext services.

We have definitely seen performance increases in the platform. A lot of that was related to just the componentry that is in it. We have sort of bought into the vision of where the platform is going to go and are hoping to see additional performance gains there. 

Synergy feels a little heavy still on the day to upgrade operations, etc. However, we have gained some efficiencies on the provisioning front-end side.

The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware.

it was pretty much the top three: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco, when we started looking at new compute. 

We decided to maintain our partnership with HPE because it's been around a long time. We know each other really well. We do a lot of business which is not server-related. They came to the table with their pricing models, investment strategies, and the partnership that they wanted to do to make their products fit better for us, which is why we chose to stick with them.

If you are deploying solutions that are well aligned with what HPE has designed this platform to do, then you will probably have pretty good success. If you are sort of weird, like us, and the things you do come off as strange, or whatever, there will be some things you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for. Therefore, you should really be partnering with HPE. You should be asking to talk to their development teams and getting feedback, such as, "Here's what we're seeing and here's how we're using it." Sometimes, as we've heard from the development teams, we've used features that they've created in ways they didn't imagine. We had some results that we didn't expect nor did they. So, that's what we're working on. If you think you will be in a similar situation, open that communication channel early and express that need to your account team.

Deployment time has decreased, for sure. What we have detected is we think the care and feeding maintenance over time might be a little higher than what we had expected. However, that is part of: 

• How are we going to structure the team? 
• How are we going to plan the work?
• How will the solution set get better?

I don't think our development team really knows of the solution or has any interactivity with it. Therefore, it hasn't necessarily enhanced nor has it detracted from a developer standpoint either.

In our environment, with what we are trying to achieve, it still has a ways to go.

The biggest lesson learned is that if you really buy into software-defined and start moving to infrastructure as code, there is a lot of power potential there, if you can just stay the course.

We have deployed HPE Synergy in a data center. Customers are using HPE Synergy for production running VMware Hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, and standalone servers. However, the customers are mostly using it for the VR solution.

The most valuable features of HPE Synergy are the two composers.

Over the two years of using HPE Synergy, we have found some hardware failures that are frequent in the SOP models, CNA cards, and converged network adapters. These failures are frequently happening for a lot of the customers.

I have been using HPE Synergy for approximately five years.

HPE Synergy is stable.

The scalability of HPE Synergy is good.

The support from  HPE Synergy is very good.

The initial setup of HPE Synergy for us is straightforward. We provide the knowledge to our customers if they choose to deploy it themselves. However, when the customers do the process it takes time and is technically demanding.

HPE Synergy is not difficult to maintain.

We have worked with the HPE technical team for Synergy cases. For example, for firmware upgrades, security purposes, and vulnerabilities.

There is a perpetual license given when you purchase HPE Synergy.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE Synergy a ten out of ten.

It is where we do most of our compute for the various different things for our homegrown software that we developed and use. We also use the product for a third-party software that we do, using cloud-based services. 

In a hybrid cloud environment, the solution enables us to a lot of databases, then different homegrown in-house developed stuff that we use for media servers and compression servers. We can also do management for workforces and optimization for workforces, in terms of the products that we provide.

We can get more density in the same physical footprint out of it, which has to do more with the density of the blades that go into the Synergy frames, because you can get less blades than you could with the old c7000s. There are just more cores and sockets with more memory available, so you can get denser with your applications. 

We build out a whole stack at one time, so we don't have to worry about it until that stack is full, then that gives us time to get the next one ready.

You don't have to have networking in every single frame, just have the interconnects. You don't have the traditional A and B side in the sort of multiple LAG groups, and so you really can sustain a lot of loss. The other side of that is if you need to sort of push more bandwidth up, you can do it because of the interconnects in the networking, and the same goes for Fibre Channel as well.

The speed in OneView and how it updates the entire configuration needs improvement. If they can do that, and it could be a little more clear on what impact different actions will have for certain things, that would be good. They do give warnings for certain things, but there are other things where they don't really give you a warning, then you do it and it will be rebooting something like the host (or whatever). If that is in a production environment, that is really dangerous. This is our pain point.

We haven't really had any problems once it was set up. The initial installation can sometimes be problematic.

We have had some weird issues with the networking and interfaces. We had an interface where if it was the first interface to join a LAG group it wouldn't come up, but if it joined second, third, or fourth, then it worked fine. We still haven't figured that one out.

The amount of time that it takes to update the entire configuration because it has to go and update so much stuff: It takes quite a long time. Then, the potential for downtime when you do that is also problematic, especially if you don't have a full three or five frame set that you are working with. If you are going from one frame to two frames or two frames to three frames there is a potential for downtime there. So, we have opted to go to full stacks when we implement them.

It is scalable. You can manage with OneView multiple frame sets. We have chosen not to do that right now, but I can see where, as we get bigger, we'll want to implement that and maybe change the frame link up a bit so we can do that. However, we haven't done that right now.

The technical support was pretty good. They were good to very good, depending on the issue.

We had the c7000, and there wasn't anything new. We needed to move forward, so we could have a platform that we could rely on for the next ten or so years. Something that we could go and deploy, taking advantage of all the functions that it has.

The initial setup was definitely different from what we were used to, so there was a learning curve. However, the more experience that we gain with it, the easier that it becomes. Every implementation has been sort of faster and easier than the previous one. We are to the point now where it is pretty straightforward for us.

We used startup services for the deployment. The frustration with that was it was contracted out to third-party vendors, so it was sort of hit or miss for what you get with third-party vendors in terms of their knowledge. That was a bit frustrating. 

We will probably always buy the startup services. However, we will do the rack and stack along with most of the wiring in terms of the network and Fibre Channel. Then, we will let them run the interconnects through the actual configuration of the enclosure itself with the startup services links.

We did look at Cisco UCS only because we thought it might be a good time to change things up, but we are really an HPE shop.

Make sure that it will work for you, your environment, what you have in mind, and what you want to accomplish. If you have a lot of small points of presents which are located around the world, this may not the best solution. However, if you are in a big data center or colocated data center, and you will be doing a lot of deployments, then I think this is a good solution.

Right now, we are mostly configuring profiles, the configuration of the frame sets, and the logical enclosure groups manually. We are moving towards having Synergy help us manage our IT landscape. That is what we are trying to get to next.

We are not using it as a fully composable infrastructure because we have storage outside of Synergy. It is sort of a hybrid of what we were doing before and what composable infrastructure really is, so that is where we are at.

It hasn't decreased our deployment time yet, but it can potentially in the future. We are trying to get not only to servers that we deploy, but the infrastructure that deploys the servers. We want to get to the point where that is all configured and deployed using infrastructure as code. We are a long ways from that, but that is where we want to get, and hopefully, we will get there.

It was the next generation of what was possible versus the old stuff where it was very confined to one frame versus multiple frames or you could make it composable and move workloads around easier.

We don't really have Synergy for our development environment.

Biggest lesson learnt: Pay attention to the nuances it. Take advantage of all the stuff which is built into the system. A lot of times, we buy technology and only use one part of it. If you use sort of the whole suite, then it works better. 

We use Synergy for VMware and some physical servers.

There is no comparison between installing a server by hand versus having everything automated in place. That makes a big difference. By automating we can avert human errors. Life becomes easier and operations become much easier.

It helps us manage our IT landscape by reducing the amount of manual work we have to do.

In terms of implementing new business requirements quickly, so far my exposure to Synergy is the fact that we can automate everything. We can easily spin up a new virtual machine and scale up our capacity for VMware. If we need to scale out or scale up an application we can do it very easily. We can have the VMware infrastructure ready in no time.

Overall, it has made us more efficient. On the infrastructure side, we have more control over the firmware and how we are managing our physical servers.

Synergy has also decreased our deployment time and reduced our cost of operations.

• It provides us with automation at the hardware level. 
• Coordination through HPE OneView is great.

I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version. The backward compatibility is there, but if we need to spend time testing the code frequently, it will make our lives difficult, and we might lose some production cycles.

It's pretty stable. We wouldn't have bought it otherwise.

It's scalable.

I don't have any experience with HPE technical support.

If someone is looking at HPE Synergy, c7000, or Cisco UCS, Synergy is worth a shot because it provides a lot of flexibility and automation. It can make the lives of operations team members, or whoever is managing the hardware, much better due to the automation. The biggest thing that I like about Synergy is the automation.

Compared to the other product that I have used, I would rate Synergy at eight out of ten. This is a cool platform. Compared to UCS this is a little better, more user-friendly.

We do a lot with ESX and virtualization of workloads.

It streamlines network connectivity, fibre connectivity. It's made it all very simple, very easy. Once you get it set up, it's ready to go.

In terms of implementing new business requirements quickly, it helps with time to deployment. We bring a new server online and, within a few hours, we have it up and running and in production. It's absolutely decreased our deployment time by four or five hours per server.

Synergy helps with the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams because I don't have to have the network guy do something for a new piece of hardware. Instead, I'm able to provision dynamically.

From a switch-port count and a fibre-port count point of view, it has definitely reduced our IT infrastructure costs.

Cable management is a big feature, in addition to time to deployment. We can buy a new server and have it up and running very quickly.

For managing our IT landscape I'm able to go into the profiles and the automating of firmware management across multiples nodes, and I am able to orchestrate all that with OneView.

I would really like a way to validate the firmware in my specific environment before trying to deploy it. Those were the issues we had early on with firmware upgrades, particularly around certificates. All in all, having some level of confidence aside from it just having been tested generically would help. Something more specific to my environment would be very helpful.

There is room for improvement in the speed; that would be the biggest thing. The time to deploy firmware... Everything takes a really long time. Having that all sped up would be nice. The 4.2 firmware release has helped tremendously with that. From my side, I see about a 30 percent improvement in speed already.

The solution is very stable. Early on we had firmware issues but those have gone away. It's moving forward very nicely.

The scalability of the solution is excellent.

Technical support has been good. Early on - we were more of an early adopter - there were some issues with support. Lately, support has been fantastic.

We were using straight DL380s before. In my previous life I used the c7000. The c7000 timeframe was up. We needed more density and fewer cables. It really wasn't too hard a decision.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We used a VAR for the initial deployment. Our experience with them was excellent. They knew the product. They had set it up before; it was very obvious. Their pre-planning was top-notch. We were very happy with them.

For the second deployment we did not use a third-party, we did that all in-house.

We really didn't have a shortlist. We are an HPE shop from start to end.

I am very happy with the solution. I have no major complaints. Support is what I expect from HPE support when it comes to these products. It has simplified our operations. I don't honestly know if it's reduced costs. It probably hasn't as of yet, as we're not full.

We're not so much using it for hybrid cloud at the moment. We're using it more for day-to-day operations. We used HPE's Education Services to move to the solution.

I would rate Synergy at nine out of ten. Everything has room for improvement. This is a robust, stable, scalable solution. I have no major complaints at this time.