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 20.9% mindshare in the category. HPE Synergy is ranked #1 in Blade Servers , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 20.6% 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

225 Views
99 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 90 HPE Synergy reviews

2,408 Views
1,668 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

HPE Synergy

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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, Cisco and others in Density Optimized Servers.

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

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

June 2025

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Helped 859,957 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 20.9%, down 30.3% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 20.6% mindshare, down 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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"We usually use three blades for two-rack units, and with enough storage, it's really a small system with a powerful CPU, powerful hard drives, powerful disks."

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

"Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing."

"It's pretty flexible. You can choose how much storage you put on the server. You can have one to three nodes, depending on whether you want more CPU or storage."

"It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems"

"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."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

"I like that it's suitable for virtualization. It's also stable and scalable. The newer version has a lot of memory, and you don't have to worry about updates."

"We have more control over the firmware and how we are managing our physical servers."

"It's very scalable. We like the idea that we can put four chassis in one of our racks, and we can connect up to 25 chassis, so the scalability to us, and being able to sync all those into one management portal, is unheard of. You can't really sync that many blades and chassis together in any other platform."

"Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us."

"It is first in class for composable infrastructure. It has the scalability that meets our future needs and the automation that builds into something that we are really looking forward to using."

"The single pane of glass management is huge, because in all our previous systems, depending on what we were managing, we would go to a different management point. Being able to go to one spot to get everything is helpful. I find that server profile creation is a lot easier in OneView than it was previously. We are able to stay compliant with firmware and updates, because we are assigning server profiles and reapplying them when there are changes. This makes everything a lot simpler."

"The flexibility to link them together and configure them gives us the ability to scale out easily, to add more compute resources as needed... The way that they're scalable and flexible means we can add additional servers in quickly... We're not spending a lot of time doing procurement and building of physical servers."

"The product enables the centralization of all administrative tasks."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

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

"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 improved cooling because that is quite an issue. If you put that much compute power into a single rack, cooling really becomes an issue. And there is room for improvement there."

"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."

"The predictive analysis feature could be improved."

"We have tried to used standardization using Ubuntu Linux and it's been hard. They had some difficulties getting the RAID configuration up and running because there are no drivers for it. It's not supported by HPE."

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

"The solution's deployment, security, and scalability need improvement."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

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

"You can always improve some things."

"One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput."

"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 the Generation 10 modules, we have observed that very often the server has hardware issues."

"The expansion was complex, because adding a second frame onto the original frame caused an outage."

"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."

"HPE Synergy could improve by developing the chassis to allow for more drives or disks. Currently, it supports only two drives in the blade server, which can be limiting."

More HPE Synergy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

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

"It costs us around $60,000 a year."

"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."

"The hardware licensing cost is reasonable."

"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."

"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."

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

"We do CAPEX."

"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."

More HPE Synergy pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

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.

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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 20% of the time

Dell PowerEdge FX vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 6% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 30% of the time

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 23% of the time

Dell PowerEdge M vs HPE Synergy

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 8% of the time

Supermicro SuperBlade vs HPE Synergy

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

June 2025

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

June 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

June 2025

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