HPE Apollo Systems vs HPE Synergy comparison

The compared HPE Apollo Systems and HPE Synergy solutions aren't in the same category. HPE Apollo Systems is ranked #2 in DOS , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 22.6% mindshare in the category. HPE Synergy is ranked #1 in Blade Servers , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 21.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of HPE Apollo Systems users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of HPE Synergy users who would recommend it.

HPE Apollo Systems

Read 22 HPE Apollo Systems reviews

264 Views
193 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 90 HPE Synergy reviews

2,798 Views
1,995 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

HPE Synergy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE Apollo Systems and HPE Synergy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei and others in Density Optimized Servers.

To learn more, read our detailed Density Optimized Servers Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 850,028 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

HPE Apollo Systems

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Rack Servers (6th), Density Optimized Servers (2nd)

HPE Synergy

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Blade Servers (1st), Composable Infrastructure (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are IT Hardware and Infrastructure solutions, they serve different purposes. HPE Apollo Systems is designed for Density Optimized Servers and holds a mindshare of 22.6%, down 30.4% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 21.8% mindshare, up 21.8% since last year.

Density Optimized Servers

Blade Servers

Featured Reviews

Gayan Senadheera

Director at Tyax Pvt Ltd

Offers higher capacities compared to other solutions, making it suitable for handling large storage needs

In terms of improvement, we could benefit from some training. If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo. Currently, we haven't received any specific training related to HPE Apollo throughout my career. If HPE Apollo provides training, we can share the knowledge with our partners, which could lead to more opportunities for HPE Apollo in the market. Deal protection and other support measures would also be beneficial, as they could help us achieve better results in this market.

Read full review

CarlosArdila

Project Manager, Information Technology at Telelago

Helps grow horizontally or vertically within one box or chassis

The initial setup is very easy. We deployed this in two days, including installation, system setup, firmware upgrades, configuration, and network connection. By the next day, we were already deploying virtual machines. We initially began with the Blade system. As the migration to SAP HANA approached, it seemed prudent to upgrade our hardware. Consequently, we facilitated their transition from the Blade system to Synergy. Subsequently, we collaborated closely with the SAP consultancy company to oversee the migration process, ensuring seamless integration of all workloads and sub-environments. We have four people working on the deployment, including a project manager, two specialists, and one tech support.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs."

"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable. It is quite effective for the work for which we are using it. We are mainly running video servers on these, and we are quite happy with the resilience, density storage, and streaming capacity of the system."

"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"

"We're going to buy another Apollo 6500. We may configure it with half the number of GPUs because that may be all we need. In a sense, we can see the Apollo 6500 being so powerful that we only need half the GPU capability that we have now."

"we can use the same platform for several use cases: Hadoop, Ceph, and we are considering the server for another use case right now. It's a single solution, we only have to integrate it once and we can use it for several technologies."

"HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature."

"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."

"When we moved to the Apollo and all flash drives, we gained a lot of performance."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

"In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity... We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with 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."

"With OneView, we can take care of all our servers in one dashboard."

"As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets."

"The i3S module can be configured to provision storage to all blade servers and boot to any operating system without needing local hard drives."

"It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes."

"It allows for easy management."

"Everything is combined in one chassis, you have storage, compute, networking. So you save a lot of space in the datacenter."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

"If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo."

"We could, perhaps, use more GPUs in the future, go from eight to 16 GPUs per instance. That could run head-to-head against the DGX-1, the DGX-2 that NVIDIA has developed in their own chassis. That would be interesting to see."

"Lustre seems to be just a little bit unstable overall."

"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."

"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."

"I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second -that would be outstanding."

"We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo."

"There is a shared battery for all cache controllers in the node. When you have to replace that element, you have to take down all three nodes and not just one."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

"I think we were promised a little more than we were given. It's true, they are working very hard to try to help remedy that."

"In the past, I have had issues with configurations."

"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."

"We'd like to see faster networking in the back-end."

"The update is problematic. When you want to update the firmware, or when you want to update software on Composer, it takes a lot of time. A lot."

"Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly."

"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."

"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."

More HPE Synergy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is more expensive than Dell which is their main competitor. However, there are times we have managed to receive a comparable price."

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."

"It is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. The standard licensing cost is for the GPU and the features that someone is using. There are additional charges but they depend on the solution."

"Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."

"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."

"We are satisfied with its price."

"There was at least about a 20 percent savings in cost over our purchase based on the purchase price of the compute modules themselves versus what we've had to pay before. It was significantly less."

"VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now."

"We pay about £500 for the solution."

"The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually."

"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."

More HPE Synergy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Density Optimized Servers solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HPE Apollo?

HPE Apollo's pricing is low, and implementation is very easy compared to other products.

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Apollo?

HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved. The solution should provide fast delivery when it comes to replacing a particular product that is under warranty.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HPE Apollo?

We use HPE Apollo for specific requirements of Linux servers.

See all answers

How would you choose between HPE's Bladesystem and Synergy?

For me, choosing between HPE’s Bladesystem and Synergy came down to which solution was more powerful, reliable, and stable. It turns out Bladesystem was the winner. Bladesystem is excellent because...

See all answers

What do you like most about HPE Synergy?

It is a good product for hypervisors.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?

Pricing in the blade server market is very competitive, with HPE offering a competitive price. Competitor products include Dell's MX series and Cisco's UCS X series.

See all answers

Comparisons

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 35% of the time

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 21% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerEdge FX vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 32% of the time

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 22% of the time

Dell PowerEdge M vs HPE Synergy

Compared 18% of the time

Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 7% of the time

Lenovo Flex System vs HPE Synergy

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

April 2025

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

April 2025

Download HPE Synergy product report

Also Known As

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo

No data available

Overview

The HPE Apollo high-density server family is built for the highest levels of performance and efficiency. They are rack-scale compute, storage, networking, power and cooling – massively scale-up and scale-out – solutions for your big data analytics, object storage and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. From water-cooling that’s 1,000X more efficient than air, to “right-sized scaling” with 2X the compute density for workgroup and private cloud workloads, the HPE Apollo line is a dense, high-performance, tiered approach for organisations of all sizes.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HPE Synergy, the first platform built from the ground up for Composable Infrastructure, offers an experience that empowers IT to create and deliver new value instantly and continuously. It is a single infrastructure that reduces operational complexity for traditional workloads and increases operational velocity for the new breed of applications and services. Through a single interface, HPE Synergy composes physical and virtual compute, storage, and fabric pools into any configuration for any application. As an extensible platform, it easily enables a broad range of applications and operational models such as virtualization, hybrid cloud, and DevOps. With HPE Synergy, IT can become not just the internal service provider but the business partner to rapidly launch new applications that become the business.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Weta Digital

HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

April 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei and others in Density Optimized Servers. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Density Optimized Servers reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.