Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Dell Technologies and others in Density Optimized Servers. Updated: March 2024.
Network End Data Center Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dec 5, 2017
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.
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.
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Dell Technologies and others in Density Optimized Servers. Updated: March 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
