HPE Synergy Reviews

I believe, compared to the C7000, which is the mainstream in Brazil, it delivers a significant amount of innovation and flexibility, and I think people there will love it. The way Brazilians see things is that, "Okay, I need something that works. I need something easy to manage, because it's expensive, manpower is expensive. And I need a reliable platform, which is easily managed, so everybody can understand and use it with ease, with no problems, and that delivers value to their business.

I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame. I understand why you cannot present storage to compute nodes on other frames, but that is a question that sometimes I get from customers. Why not? I say, "Okay, you have to have a cable running over and have another SAN switch on the second frame. It will not be easy. I don't know if HPE is satisfied with this approach. They're saying, "Okay, let's stick with the drawer presenting volumes within the same frame." But the satellite architecture it's incredible. It was very well thought out. 

And the management ring, I think it's also great. 

These advancements - regardless of the advancements on chips, on more memory, addressing, computing, etc., customers expect that - but with this architecture of the management rings, this is really nice. This is a very nice idea. 

The Image Streamer, I see the value of it. Hopefully, customers will see the value of it, but I don't expect many Brazilians deploying Image Streamers, because they don't have this culture.

OneView, as a single point, a single management tool, it makes me delirious. It's really nice. People developing using the API for OneView, I don't see it too much. Brazilians are still at the beginning of this idea of consuming IT as a service. Their approach is, "Okay, I have all the APIs exposed and I can program my own Chef recipe and simple recipe and use and orchestrate Synergy the way I want." They are still in the early stages of this, but maybe it will gain traction in the future.

I rate Synergy a nine out of 10 because there's no perfection. But I think that in terms of the proposition of the product, what the product wants to achieve, they really achieved it. I was at the booth (at the Discover conference in Madrid) on the next generation of Synergy and I talked to an engineer. I asked what has changed? He said we changed some specs, etc. We delivered the Image Streamer composing Windows machines, we put the VC with an extra gig, etc. It was expected. It is a minor advance, in my opinion. This is not bad, this is good. This means they met their criteria, the whole criteria, in the initial launch of the product, so there is nothing to evolve into, all of a sudden.

So, to really evolve the product from where it is right now, it will take time. That means the product was very well conceived, they mostly meet their goals for the product. The next generation, let's say the ServerSpec for Windows, it's just minor stuff, but we expected it, so this is a very good sign. It's a very mature product from the start.

What I would like to see is a little bit more of architecture-oriented advertising campaigns or events for customers; not on the product itself, but more on the way they advertise products. They are too focused on the features. This is okay, but sometimes what I see that people lack is, "Okay, I understood the features, but how can I use this in practical terms? How can I put my Oracle in there? How can I use it for a VDI? Can I architect a huge SQL cluster with it, and what would be the best way to do that?"

I think that the documentation says that, but I don't see any events. I don't see any advertising in those terms.

In the end, it's more like they are giving the components, but they are not showing what you can do with the components. You can see you have all this, but what can I do from this? Can I make a cake out of it, or I can do an omelet? I can, but how? That's the missing link. They need to give me some ideas on how I can use this in such a way that I achieve my goals. This is the only thing that I really think the product lacks, a little bit more consumer-focused mindset. 

When you are talking about the product, talking only about features is good for me, for the partner, because I understand how to use the features to make the cake, but they don't.

It varies from area to area. From the storage guys, I get very strong support. They are very sympathetic guys, good knowledge. They are very smart people and they are really willing to help. 

From the networking guys, so-so. I don't know exactly why, but they leave you a little bit, let's say, on your own. But, in that area, the HPE documentation is very good. So you don't have to fall back to support often. 

Servers, I don't really need support, because you can find your way around. 

But with other stuff, software stuff especially, say Data Protector - now it's Micro Focus - it was a total nightmare. 

So, it varies from area to area and I can see within HPE they have different approaches in different areas. The storage guys are more like a family. They work together, they are committed together. The networking guys, they are more "I'm a self-made man, so it's me, it's him," it's not us. I feel that more or less. And servers, it's okay: "What do you need, give me a yell. I'll help you with that." Simplivity, I haven't had any experience with Simplivity as of yet. So, I can't tell you anything about it. 

But for Synergy, the Synergy guys, they are very good, really supportive.

In Brazil, they have a culture of reusing things, they don't like to dispose of a server every three years or so. I know in Europe and United States, a refresh cycle of three years is absolutely normal and they are ready to scrap their G7, scrap their G8, and get the G9. But in Brazil you can find G5 easily, G5 and G6. They have this culture of extending the lifetime of the product as much as they can or until it breaks.

With Simplivity, I think that we can address that very nicely, because as you can expand, it's the latest technology and you can put so many things in it. You can put storage, it can present every compute node, you can support satellites and expand the chassis. I believe that this will address this behavior that the Brazilians have and they'll say, "Okay, so I can invest in this platform now and believe that seven years from now, it will be the same. I will still be able to put hardware on it, I can still use it." And that will create fidelity from them for HPE.

The only driver, I cannot state this strongly enough, the only driver that I face when with I'm a customer, and I meet Dell or I meet Lenovo there, is money. They like them because they're cheaper.

I have never heard a customer saying HPE has a better product. I have never heard anybody say a Dell server is better than an HPE server; a Lenovo server is better than an HPE server. I always hear them say it's cheaper. This is what compels them to buy Dell, on whichever level, whether it's networking, storage, servers.

I just took my certification in Synergy. I was one of the first technicians in Brazil who qualified for Synergy. The main driver for me to take the certification for this platform is because I deem Synergy like an evolutionary platform rather than revolutionary. I think the machine will be the revolution, but Synergy is an evolutionary platform.

HPE is really the leading platform. I heard once that HPE is a company that is run by engineers. And engineers are passionate about it. Dell doesn't create things. Dell just manufactures things. That's why I love HPE technology so much, because I understand that HPE is really about engineering stuff and creating stuff and doing it better. Dell, they are just getting parts somewhere. They are assembling it, and they are selling it cheaper. 

That's why I really love HPE and I'm a strong partner. There's a strong partnership with HPE and I don't see leaving it anytime in the future. I come to the HPE Discover conference very often, attended the last Discover in Las Vegas. I'm attending this one in Madrid, and every time, the same: My commitment with HPE gets stronger and stronger and I really love the technology.

Moving virtual machines over to Synergy.

In a hybrid cloud environment, the solution enables us to do SQL. We are able to move it up and take it down.

Storage-wise, I don't have to order more storage. It is so modular that I can pick and add what I need.

The solution helps to manage our IT landscape by allocating more servers.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. We are installing weight scales across the state. We can bring up machine per weigh station quickly.

When our development team requests servers or services, we are able to bring it up. The return time of bringing up a virtual machine hardware is now quicker.

It has a modular design. We are able to add more to it when needed.

It is really easy to use, because it's GUI-based. It is not command line based, like mainframes.

There are some functions which are not clear cut.

Instead of having Synergy vertical, make it horizontal. It is easier to stick in when it is vertical.

So far, it has been really stable for three years.

The scalability is good. We were trying to order another system to be able to install at the state data center, and it was very scalable. 

I haven't had to talk to technical support yet.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed in-house.

We have not seen ROI.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure costs. 

I would go with Synergy. It is better than the Nutanix solution. Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy.

Go with what is comfortable for the employees. We were using HPE for some time, then we switched off of it for some time. After switching back, our employees adapted to it quickly, because it was easy to use.

I wasn't here when they began installing it, so I can't tell what the deployment time was before. Over time as the teams get used to it, the return time is now two to three hours.

The primary use case is really a replacement for the BladeCenter. Though, we would like our customers to see it more in the composable fashion that it has been positioned. The primary use case (as our customer see it) is they can't go further with BladeCenter, so they are choosing Synergy.

Traditionally, our customers have been using their BladeCenter, and now Synergy, to run any type of mid-tier applications or virtualized platforms that, for whatever reason, don't fit in the hyper-converged area. 

From a hybrid cloud perspective, Synergies are more seen for the potential of integrating into orchestrated and automated deployments, so they can have cloud-like functionality on-premise. They are not quite at that yet, and in the couple cases where we have deployed it, that has certainly been the goal.

We do have one customer who very specifically uses it for back office applications during the day (during business hours), then they will actually swap it into a scheduling facility at night. Therefore, those jobs that are running off hours can be used for it. So, we do actually have one customer who is doing that.

In another case, we have a customer who is heavily orchestrated, and we have written a significant number of automation tools for them. In that case, we are in the process of PoC'ing that automation process and tying that into the orchestration tools. Whereas in the past, both their hyper-converged environment, as well their ProLiant rack servers and their BladeCenter, would not tie very well into the orchestration.

Productivity of deployment goes back to the automation tie-ins and fluidity of the resource. If they can reuse componentry, knowing they can do that based on a temporal basis, and they have some type of scheduling facility, then this makes it significantly easier.

It has the next level beyond hyper-converged:

1. It has that promise of combining the orchestration and automation.
2. Being able to no longer have an isolated bare metal environments, then converged infrastructure with virtualized environments. The ability to have both platforms in one infrastructure. Then, simultaneously have the ability to go between them and isolate workloads while still having shared workloads. That sort of mix and match and fluidity of being able to reassign.

Secondarily, the temporal value of it. If I only need a particular amount of compute for a specific period of time during business hours, then at night, I'm running a bunch of batch jobs, or doing something else, that ability to swap a profile, swap templates, and have compute assigned to something else, saves significant amount of money. As long as you are tying it into the automation and orchestration layers, it becomes much easier to do.

Continue the playbooks with the automation integrations. More of that would be good, as it has been great so far. 

I would really like to see the type of hardware add-on operationalization made simpler in some way. How do I have a chassis and add in a second or third chassis, but not have to be so aware that it is number 11 versus number 12 within the frame? If they can address that, it would be a home run.

Continue the path of integrating OneView into a single product. A lot of different people have different OneView experiences based on which product they have used it for.

In the past, there has been some question around the stability of networking components of it. It has been a long time since HPE has had a significant server issue, but from the networking component and newer networking components, there have been significant improvements from the past.

I love the idea of Synergy and its ability to scale out. Operationally, it is a little bit challenging to manage at this point. When you add onto it, you have to be very aware of where you are in the frame, on your count, and what components. You may have to move a satellite module or you may have to reallocate componentry, which is already there. That scale aspect is challenging. From a hardware perspective, it is not transparent.

From a scalability within existing resources, it is very scalable and much easier to use. E.g., I have deployment requests coming down from some orchestration layer and just need to add available resources and compute.

In a couple cases, it was really just sort of that end of life of BladeCenter. In another case, they saw the temporal value aspect and the customer thought that swapping would make a ton of sense.

There is more to keep in mind with Synergy. Remember that our customers are coming from BladeCenters. Where after 10 to 15 years of it, and everybody found it fairly simple at this point, then they have this new paradigm of scaling out to many multiple frames, and so many more modules. It is a change in mindset. Therefore, some people will say that it is complex simply because of that. It is not that difficult though.

We deploy with the help of HPE consultants. Our experience with the HPE consultants is very positive. They have been all over it, more so than the customer even.

For temporal use, when you throw on the fact that you're essentially doubling your capacity, right there you could claim a 50 percent TCO reduction. As far as ROI, that becomes a lot harder because it is dependent on the level of automation that you have built into that reallocation as you are introducing a step that wasn't there before either, where as you would have just built two different infrastructures and the cost would have been upfront. So, the ROI is really in the reduction of total costs.

It still sort of comes up occasionally against some of the HCI competitors, but it's a totally different approach.

Synergy is chosen based on that mix of being able to do bare metal, multiple types of virtualization and the fluidity of the resource rather than it being all virtualized, then fluidity.

Focus on the fluidity of resources and view everything from that lens. Always remember that is the justification for some of the complexity. Once you can set it up appropriately, it will be worth it. If you view it purely from a non-fluid, assign this - just like you would a blade, then you may find it more complex, and in some cases, more expensive to manage.

Right now, there are pros and cons to whether it is affecting our customer's IT infrastructure. It is probably net neutral because there are some complexity from an operationalization aspect that increases compared to what they're used to. Being able to know what number frame it is within the Synergy frame. Operationally you are ordering different parts differently based on where you are in that count. That adds a certain complexity to them managing it on a growth and scale perspective. So, you are sort of giving up one efficiency to get the other right now. That is something that will be addressed better over time, and it is even better than it was two years ago already.

It hasn't proven to implement new business requirements quickly, but it certainly has that promise. In its worst case, it is just another hardware-centric solution. In its best case, the customer will have the automation tie-in to actually make this happen.

Biggest lessons learnt:

1. You should be aware of your workloads from a time basis, which means you need to be monitoring and analyzing those workloads more. 
2. The absolute necessity of automation.

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.

It's our day-to-day production device. We deploy our workloads and VMs in clusters on it.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly, by using the Composer for efficiency. It has also improved the productivity of our development team due to the efficiency of being able to deploy via Composer. We're able to deploy development environments rapidly. We have seen about a 25 percent reduction in deployment times.

Ease of use.

It's absolutely reliable. Zero outages.

It's easily scalable.

Technical support is solid. We really haven't had issues with it, so we haven't had to go down that path much yet.

We had aging gear. We went from c7000s into Synergy.

The initial setup was straightforward. We met them at the data center for four days. We racked, stacked, and deployed it. They showed me the ropes. It was easy.

We used an integrator/reseller. They were solid.

We've seen ROI through density and capacity into it. Where I had four c7000 chassis running a lot of standalone stuff, I was able to consolidate a lot of that and virtualize it. It has reduced our cost of operations and IT infrastructure costs, the latter by about 50 percent. With aging gear that needed long-term maintenance, consolidating into a chassis or two reduced maintenance costs.

We went with Synergy because it was the best-in-breed and the next generation, from the existing c7000s. We're exclusively an HPE shop, so we didn't really fish around.

Definitely go with it. Use this product. It's best-in-breed. The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to continue using this solution.

I would give it a nine out of ten for sure because it's 100 percent reliable and for the ease of use. I seldom give anything a ten. There's always room for improvement, I'm just not thinking of a specific feature or two that are missing, but there is certainly a feature or two missing.

Internally, we use it for VSAN as well as Docker, with the flexibility to flop between the two solutions at will. We also demonstrate the solution for multiple customers.

Performance is fantastic.

The big benefit that we are seeing is the fact that we are so highly flexible. It makes things more agile. We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry.

• The composable infrastructure with the Image Streamer.
• Being able to seamlessly migrate from one operating environment to another within minutes, is invaluable.

I'm very curious to see what comes with 4.0.

The big thing will be streamlining the Image Streamer process for deployment. The actual frame itself - Composer, OneView, all that - works fantastic. The more granular permissions that I know are coming are great. That answered a lot of our big questions and big customer demand. 

Now it's about the flexibility and the simplicity of using the product day to day and getting new features stood up as customer demands come forward. I'm not sure exactly what I want next but I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

Stability is fantastic at this point. I think it's come a long way. I think with the latest versions, especially the new version coming out in December, it's been fantastic and we're looking forward to it.

The scalability is fantastic. It goes from a relatively small size to as large as you want it to go. I've yet to find a customer that couldn't use Synergy to scale to their needs.

I've used tech support extensively. They've been fantastic with the solution so far. I've been engaged on several support calls as we stood up our frame and got things going. We ran into some issues that were very unique, to say the least. We were engaged with support within minutes, case was resolved quickly, we were escalated when we needed to be escalated, and everything was seamless. I mean it was, overall, a great experience.

It has gotten better. The initial setup we did was on 3.0 and that was overly complex. With 3.10, everything's been changed, revolutionized, the guided setup made things a breeze. I've been able to walk colleagues of mine through it. I'm able to demonstrate to customers how easy it is to set the frame up and get things going right out of the box. That's been an incredible change.

We've gotten enough training that we're able to set the product up for our customers and walk customers through it without the need for having HPE expertise on site. Worse case scenario, they're a phone call away, but it's been so simple to use, it's been fantastic.

For us, when selecting a vendor,

• Simplicity is a big factor. We've got a very broad range of customers, including ourselves.
• We're looking at what is fast, what is simple, does performance and value meet those expectations? 
• We're looking for stuff where there's not a whole lot of, I don't want to say hands-on, but where there's not a lot of need to be nitty-gritty to get things going quickly.
• The ability to customize things for our customers' environments is great.

Those are all the features we're looking for when we're looking for our partner. We evaluate, obviously, agnostic across the board, as a partner. So we're constantly evaluating HPE versus Dell versus Cisco, and time and time again HPE wins that battle because of the simplicity; because of the feature-rich environment. They're just leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else.

I would give it an eight out of 10 overall. It is a great solution. Obviously, we had a few stumbles. We still get a lot of questions of "Why Synergy versus the current generation products?" Some of those things aren't always apparent. I do know that with things coming down the road, with Photonics and the like, it's going to alleviate a lot of other things. It's a solution that's most of the way there. I'm looking forward to seeing it get across the finish line to be the all encompassing datacenter solution for our customers.

There's no other solution that's similar. This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market. If you're researching this, you're going down the right path. The best thing to do is actually get hands-on and get a demo. Contact HPE and start taking a look at the advance features and start looking at how your applications and demands are going to be met and how you want to customize your experience going forward.

HPE Synergy could improve its remote support.

I have been familiar with HPE Synergy for approximately 10 years.

HPE Synergy is a stable solution.

The scalability of HPE Synergy is good.

The support is good they have helped us.

I have used Lenovo and they have large servers and are easy to support.

The deployment of HPE Synergy is easy and takes approximately three to four hours.

My advice to others is this solution is easy to deploy.

I 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.