What needs improvement with HPE Synergy?

The pricing could be improved.

The hardware specs are impressive, and its flexibility for scalability is noteworthy. Based on our experience, it fulfills our needs efficiently. Implementing it has been straightforward without any significant configuration hassles. Perhaps the only suggestion would be to consider more frequent system updates.

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 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.

There is always room for improvement. Based on our use cases, I don't believe there are any additional features required.

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.

There is an HP plugin we need to enable in vCenter for RMCV backups. Sometimes we observe that the data storing is not happening correctly. It's like that data store, whatever we have added in Synergy, takes a backup in a day. Sometimes we observe that the backup is not happening properly. We used to get alert emails that the backup was failing for the particular storage. In that case, we needed to do a restoration during that time. It would give us a lot of trouble to restore the VM from a particular backup. There is no expertise. There is a lack of expertise at an acceptable level from the technical teams. We need very senior higher-level technical teams to come in in the future. It takes a lot of time to analyze the logs. In the Generation 10 modules, we have observed that very often the server has hardware issues. We have to frequently contact the vendors.

The hardware is fine but OneView needs additional event management and filtering options. Documentation could better describe the solution's configuration possibilities. Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage. The solution is a hardware that is defined by its software so management issues can occur on servers or within the software running the hardware. For example, an electric car depends on its software. If the software is bad, then you can expect issues and problems that might not allow you to start the car. A technician might have uploaded the wrong code into firmware or a software developer might have make code mistakes and these things cause issues. The solution can only be as reliable as the software used to run it.

HPE Synergy could improve its remote support.

Maybe two years before, there were issues with drivers. However, the issues were always fixed quickly. They were not so deep into integration with VMware. As a partner of VMware, I'm focused more on VMware products and I don't remember many details about HPE now that time has passed. However, there should be more integration.

The user interface could be more user-friendly. It's for admins, and you should have the knowledge to use it.

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.

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.

It's a pretty complex solution. The continuous update of the firmware and the patch updates and security updates for the hardware make it continuously complex. It all comes back to complexity. I don't have any other concerns. It's all about how complex the component is.

It would be nice if the updates were not accompanied by downtime. We have encountered this issue at times over the years. The solution should come with external storage connectivity. Owing to these minor issues, I choose to rate the solution as a nine out of ten.

The connectivity needs to be improved. The compatibility with old infrastructure and networking should be better than what it is now. The networking part is very complex. It should be simplified. The setup was a bit complex. They need to make it easier for firmware upgrades. The virtual connection is very complex and they need to make it easier. The storage configuration should be improved. When we are connecting the 3PAR storage to Synergy, I have to manually add the values again when what should be happening is, when I'm connecting, when I'm assigning, the storage should be automatically allocated.

The performance could be better. The converged network cards initially didn't work. However, later on in the newer version, they came up with 50 GB network cards to replace the 20 GB ones, and it's perfectly fine now. At times, it could also be more stable.

I've found the user experience to not be that great. It's something that they could really improve on. They need to make it more user-friendly. The profiles aren't so easy to work with. We find the agility to be lacking.

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

In the past, I have had issues with configurations.

As concerns room for improvement, the number of levers in the system should be addressed. Technical solutions should be made easier. The advice I would give is that HPE Synergy increase the availability of the deployment.

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 think the main issue with Synergy is a topology that HPE defines to connecting and creating a cluster. There are satellites and interconnecting modules which should interconnect with one special topology. If you want to change that and add another shelf in the cluster you have to change everything. I think it's very, very complex. But for example, in UCS, you have fabric interconnects, USC blades connect to fabric interconnects. It allows you to add more and more USC blades to the fabric interconnect. There is no connectivity between blades chassis. In Synergy, there are many connections between the blades chassis and I think that's the main issue. The other thing is that Synergy has a composer module that OneView runs on and which manages that cluster. I don't like HPE softwares. I think, for example, in comparison, the UCS manager is the better solution for managed blades than OneView. OneView is not as strong for that It would be helpful if Synergy would add Cisco networking products, and network models in CSG, C 7000, maybe Blade models, software Cisco products, for example, b 22, CISCO B22 modules. I think the number of customers that use Cisco in their data centers is more than the customers that use HPE solutions. Because of that, I think HPE should add Cisco products and network modules to Synergy - I think that would be a good idea.

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.

The OneView has improved a lot throughout the years with the release of the Synergy and OneView version 4, although it still has issues. The stability and smoothness of firmware upgrades for the compute modules can be improved by enabling full composability of the Synergy Frame.

One of the features I want to see, which I will see with OneView 5.0, is to have all the OneView consoles in a single pane of glass. That will make it easy to see everything in one place and not have to log in to multiple consoles.

There is room for improvement in the setup.

I would like a longer amount of data for bandwidth utilization on Ethernet ports inside, as well as uplinks. The amount of data stored on them is way too small.

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.

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.

I would definitely like to see them fix the firmware updates on all the blades. No matter what operating system it is running on, make sure I can do the firmware as well as the software for those firmware components at the same time. I don't want to have to rely on an external product. Let's bring that product inside the menu so that I have a better experience with updates. Firmware is a very big thing. I would also like them to bring management of all the Synergy equipment into a single management interface, no matter where they're located.

I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure. Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent.

I would like to see more nodes in a single chassis so we wouldn't have to purchase additional chassis.

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.

For the storage modules, which can be put in a single frame, they currently can only be addressed to compute modules within the same frame. It would be nice to be able to use those to assign cross frame.

I would like them to work more on the templates, targeting it to a larger scale organization which has to run 24/7. Maybe they can try to get that workload to target certain parts of an application that has to be on 24/7. The common example that we keep getting is with our animators. They have one template which is dedicated to their resources, and in the night, it does rendering. However, when we have stuff which is running 24/7, it's not really something that applies. So, maybe they can try finding more applicable use cases. The solution has affected the productivity our deployment a little, but it has just been the normal getting used to the new system. I think once they get used to it, it will be fine.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest problem that I have with it is the speed of setup.

A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution. I would like to see an increased variety of uplink options in the Virtual Connects. The inclusion of these features would allow us to more easily grow our network infrastructure and accommodate future growth. There are improvements that can be made in the area of OneView integrations and firmware, with respect to how the proper firmware versions are matched to the OneView installation that you have.

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.

The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient. A spreadsheet seems a bit out-of-date

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.

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.

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

It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure. We are all about graphics. I know that the Synergy has a sidecar on it, so innovation into graphics capabilities and more broadly used storage. Right now, we have 180 blades and 15 frames, but our only solution for storage is either onboard the blade itself or some network-based storage. We could probably bring some Fibre Channel into play. However, we would maybe like to see some innovation around the storage and those systems. It still has some room to grow. For our solution, we need something between the c7000 and Synergy. Synergy is the high-end deployment, and we're still learning to how to do the composable infrastructure, so we can turn it around and make it look like this today and that tomorrow. The c7000 gave us a stable workstation remodel. We went from an Acura to a Maserati, needing something in between.

It would be nice if the OneView umbrella could truly be one view and cover everything. Synergy has its own version of OneView. ProLiant Servers have their own version of OneView, so it truly isn't one view. We also have other platforms within HPE that aren't covered by OneView at all. We have many views instead of one view, and it would be nice if that could be resolved. That would help us a lot. The timeliness of updates, firmware, and things of that nature needs improvement, as far as what we have to apply, and when, being able to maintain a consistent load on each one of our frames.

I am rating this solution an eight (out of ten) because it is really good. However, you can always improve some things.

The setup experience needed some improvement.

I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources.

Stability when you upgrade needs improvement.

I'd like to see the firmware updates, as well as the built-in OneView and imager in Composer, become a little more powerful and faster. I would expect that newer blades that would go in it would have newer processors and be faster. It's pretty flexible with storage. There are new solutions on the storage front, that are going into it as well. I expect that portfolio to increase, just like with the rest of the solutions they have. Other than that, I think everything's great.

Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly. There is room for improvement to OneView.

I would just like it to work.

A big thing for me is moving InfoSight for ProLiant into OneView, or at least connecting it. Today we have to use the iLO Amplifier Pack and that would require us to reconfigure iLO on every single one of the servers, independently, to get that data into InfoSight. We're really looking for a single control and management plane. Also, Fibre Channel support within the Virtual Connect modules is lagging behind on the speed and the connections and configuration.

I would like the ability to have my storage components accessed from any other frame across the backplane. If we have a storage module and we run out of space in that frame, it'd be nice to be able to share it across the frames. You can do it with hyperconverged. Why can't you do it with Synergy?