HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

The insert RAM feature is the most valuable. It is a simple software to integrate with others like service desk applications and engine management.

In terms of additional features, there is nothing that I would add. However, the pricing can be improved as it is a costly solution due to sanctions in Iran. When we buy an HP service or system, we need a company in China to purchase it and send it to Iran. This gets very expensive as it takes time to complete this, and by the time we receive the product, the HP or Cisco company says it's the end of the sale, and there is a new version. The limitations and sanctions are very harmful to Iranian IT specialists.

We have been using this solution for five years. It is deployed on a hybrid cloud.

There are limitations to the technical support due to the sanctions in Iran.

I rate this solution a ten 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 were evaluating it to replace some of our older infrastructure. We have Dell M1000e Blade chassis. We were doing a proof of concept for the last three months with it.

It would cover all kinds of workloads. We have Oracle Databases, we have SQL databases, we have web servers. There's a VMware environment with VMs that manage all sorts of workloads.

In our case, it would not be an improvement over the way our company functions. We have unique scaling demands. Our storage demands scale very differently than our compute demand scales. So doing HCI anything doesn't really fit well, currently, with how we operate. But that's why we were testing it. We were trying to figure out how can we scale it, or can we scale it, so that it fits within what we're currently required to do. We are not going to be able to do HCI currently. We're looking at other solutions.

The most valuable feature, personally, is that I'm already very familiar with OneView because we manage 3PAR storage as well. Having familiarity with OneView and the 3PAR infrastructure, and being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform, are the most valuable aspects to me.

If it would be possible to connect clusters of five with other clusters, so that they could all share resources, that would change the game for us. It would make it a viable solution for us.

There is room for improvement with support. That's a big one because of the struggle we had getting the technical expertise which we needed. Improving support is hard to do. It's a global company. They've got disparate teams with disparate specialties all over the place and it's a very new product. So we tried to take all that into account when we were evaluating. In the end, before you push a product out, your support has to know how it works and how to support it.

It is very stable. We didn't have any problems with the stability at all.

Obviously, it's very scalable. You're limited to five total - not chassis, they call them something else - but you're limited to five. So it is scalable to a point. But that's where we run into our problems because we need all of our servers in our infrastructure to have access to my storage. We can't segment out storage and have it only available to these five chassis.

We did use technical support and I would rate it poorly. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it a five. It wasn't terrible, but it's the fact that it's such a new product and it doesn't seem like even the people who are supposed to be supporting it really understand it yet. 

We went around and around in circles on one particular issue for about two weeks and it was a simple "check the box" in this area. When we finally checked the box, everything started working, but it took us two weeks to figure that out with their help.

The solution we have now works but, like technology always has, it gets old and then you have end-of-life, end-of-support and you have to make other choices. Everybody's going HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, so we're trying to evaluate that.

Configuration was difficult because it's so new. Even the people at HPE weren't well-versed on how to configure it correctly. So it took a lot longer to configure than we thought it would. But once we got it configured, it functioned very well.

It took us about a month to get it configured, to get all the bugs worked out. Then we were able to utilize it for about two months as part of our proof of concept.

Ninety percent of it was straightforward. The ten percent that was complex was only complex because it's not very intuitive. You have to know where to go within OneView to find the options that you need. And because it's not intuitive, it's not easy for someone who has never done it before to do it. And it wasn't easy for the people who were supposed to know how to do it, either.

We had HPE consultants and a VAR. We had about six people, four from HPE, two from our VAR, and our whole team working on it for a month to try to deploy it. It was a struggle.

We're also looking at the Dell EMC MX chassis. When we finished our HPE proof of concept, we started the Dell EMC proof of concept. That's what we're doing currently.

The biggest lesson I learned personally, using Synergy, was that it takes quite a while to properly evaluate something as complex as Synergy. Two weeks in, I was ready to just say, "This as a piece of junk and I never want to use it." But two months in, it was actually working really well and I was trying to figure out how we could make it work in our environment. It takes a while, but if you can get it set up right and get a little bit of expertise in it, it's a wonderful platform.

My advice would be to take your time. Get very familiar with it and make sure it's going to meet the needs that your business has, because it may not. Or maybe it fits perfectly. If you don't take the time to really study it then you won't know, and you don't want to get stuck. That's would be an expensive mistake to make.

The product is well-designed and engineered. They've thought through a lot of the things that were problems with the c7000 chassis, for example, and they've made a lot of improvements. From an engineering perspective, I would give it an eight out of ten. It might be right for all workloads but it's not right for all environments. Our environment is one of those that doesn't fit well with HCI.

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 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.

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.

We primarily use the solution in order to deploy an on-prem client.

The most valuable feature within the solution is the main management offering. They call it the GreenLake offering. It's the OPEX model. They manage that for the client.

The stability is very good so far. The performance has been reliable.

The solution is easily scalable. You can expand it if you want to.

If you have the right team in place, the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Technical support is excellent. They are very helpful.

They're way ahead of the game. The software-defined fabric they have is very good.

They actually have a different offering with Nutanix. That's more generic. The Synergy platform is HPE-specific and more for on-premises. You're kind of locked in with VMware and the HPE with the VMs. The Nutanix offering is a bit more flexible.

I've been using the solution for about a year and a half. That was when it was installed by a client. It hasn't been too long.

We have the stability to be reliable. The performance is good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is extremely scalable. It's one of the highlights of the product for us. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease.

It's a data center offering. Whatever applications are installed on there, and, in our case, there are hundreds of applications installed, services all the users.

We have been in touch with their technical support and they assisted us in the implementation process. Their assistance is top-of-the-line. The team is helpful and responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of support provided.

I have experience with Nutanix. I would say with Nutanix, the sky's the limit there. It's very comprehensive and it integrates with all the clouds - and you have the on-prem as well if you need it.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's straightforward. With the team we had, it was fairly easy. We also had assistance from HPE throughout the process, and having their insights were helpful.

In general, the maintenance is handled by HPE. We don't have to worry about it.

HPE was there all along the way. It was very good. They're very good to work with.

I can't discuss the exact amount of money we pay for licensing. The amount is confidential.

It's my understanding that the deal we arrived at was very competitive.

We are consultants. HPE is simply a service provider for us.

I don't recall which version of the solution we are using.

I would advise others considering the solution to consider the Nutanix HPE with the GreenLake as an alternate. There is just a little bit more flexibility in a product like Nutanix, although they are all good.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.