HPE Apollo Systems Reviews

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.

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

I have been using this solution for three to four years. We have two different generations. We have servers that were bought four years ago and two years ago.

It is stable.

It is easy to scale. We are on top of it. We have an application from a specific vendor. We, as well as the software vendor, are happy with it.

It was really straightforward. The process for installing and commissioning the services was easy.

We are using our own teams for installation. We are quite autonomous on it. We internally have the knowledge to do the job. We are happy with it.

Our infrastructure team is managing all the hardware, virtual machines, and operating systems. We have around 2,000 servers. We don't have a dedicated team for Apollo. We have a team that takes care of all the generations of servers, including Apollo.

I can recommend this solution. It is easy to maintain. If you have an infrastructure team, you won't have any problem with it.

I would rate HPE Apollo a nine out of ten.

We've only been using it for about a month so far. This is a system that's on loan to us from HPE. It's a Gen10 version with eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs and four nodes. We have already purchased the unit. This is on loan to us until we receive the Apollo 6500 that we ordered.

For storage we're using a Seagate SSD Array, all-flash array, as well as EL4000. The Apollo 6500 is for machine-learning, specifically for wafer generation, wafer analysis, for one of our operations sites in Minnesota.

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. That in conjunction with what Mellanox offers would provide us with a very high-speed networking interface.

The other thing is we may 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.

Excellent product. It's extremely reliable so far. The loan-er model we have is excellent. We have had no problems with it.

In some ways, we think it may go beyond what we need moving forward. We don't know yet. 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. But that's what we think we're going to end up seeing as we continue to go through this process of machine-learning.

Tech support has been outstanding. In fact, what HPE is doing is helping us develop the software stack for us to be able to move forward with this whole approach. Our intent is to develop a machine-learning and inference capability within all of Seagate operations, which include eight sites around the world.

My expectation is that this is going to be a rather huge improvement in our operations process. It takes about six months for us to build a single hard drive, and we sell millions of them per year. So you can imagine how important it is for us to develop an analytics capability that HPE is offering us. So it isn't just the Apollo 6500, it's also the software stack that runs on top of it.

We use three Apollo 2600 enclosures with a total of 12 servers as a Splunk cluster for all our log handling. 

In the beginning we used Splunk in a virtual environment and the performance was quite hard on that system. So when we moved to the Apollo and all flash drives, we gained a lot of performance on that.

It is quite simple when you get it going. I like the blade concept that makes is so much easier to handle the servers.

We unfortunately 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.

Very much a stable solution. No downtime yet. I think it's a configuration issue on our end but we have burned through quite a lot of the NVM system drives. The system does some swapping somewhere, so that has caused some issues.

It will meet our needs, definitely, going forward.

They have been very responsive and knowledgeable. As I say, we have mostly had trouble with the drives, and we have received the help and the replacement parts that we need.

From my end, I like that we get everything from HPE. So it's quite easy to point at HPE if something breaks. We have the switches from HPE, we have the storage from HPE, the service from HPE. So it's quite easy to get their help when something breaks, because they are responsible for all the parts in our datacenter.

We're using it for big data and storage servers. So mostly Hadoop for big data, Hadoop elastic search, and Ceph storage for our OpenStack private cloud.

The Apollo is performing fairly well. We've run into minor issues, but overall it does the job and we feel it's a good product for the money. 

It's allowed us to benefit from IP-based storage instead of using only fiber channel SAN storage. Also, I don't think we could have afforded that quantity of storage in a SAN array.

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. And 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.

There should be truly independent nodes for your rack, which can contain three different servers. I like to make sure when a component fails, I don't have to take down all three nodes. This is especially true as we usually have replication between these nodes. It would be a great asset to be able to contain the downtime to one of the nodes.

It's pretty stable. We've only had very minor issues with it. No major downtime. 

The only issues we've really run into so far is that 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. That's something of a design flaw, but it's the only real issue we've had so far.

Yes, we've called tech support. Mostly for hardware faults.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria include

• overall trust in the company
• the financial side, of course, the price of the hardware 
• the quality of the support we can expect.

I rate it at eight out of 10. As I said, true independence between the nodes would be an improvement. At least make sure that the nodes aren't dependent on each other. Also, we've had a few difficulties integrating it at first, so I'll stay with an eight.

Test the solution and do a proof of concept until it works with your own integration procedures, the way you install systems, that kind of thing.

We primarily use it for high-performance computing. Our customers really do like it because of the density they can achieve in the racks. Apollo provides so much compute power and storage as well.

It's performing extremely well.

It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems, which is really a big thing for us.

High compute density and high storage density at a reasonable cost

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

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.

Extremely reliable. We've been using it for three years now, and it's been in production without any downtime yet.

Especially if you use software defined storage, for instance, scalability is just great.

We have not use HPE support. We have our own engineers, so we're really proficient enough. And it's really easy to use. So it's not a big deal.

We actually had a business case. We were looking to address this business case with standard IT storage solutions but they were way too pricey for us. So we figured we needed a way to use a standard service, make the most of these standard services, and came across Apollo Systems. Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing.

It was straightforward.

We do look to Super Micro whenever price is king. But if we are looking for reliability, then HPE is the way to go.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is reliability. We need a vendor to be there for us, even when the product is already three or four years old. That's a big thing for us.

I give it an eight out of 10. It does what we expect it to do. As I said, cooling is still an issue, you really have to keep that in mind if you implement the solution. But aside from that, we're really happy with it.

Talk to a partner who has implemented a solution with HPE Apollo, talk to customers who have actually used it in the field. It's really simple to do.

I specifically purchased it to address a need I have for DPM. I needed DPM to back up to a specific location in both of my datacenters that I have in Ireland. I needed just a lump of slow storage, but that was big, to take 30-day disk backups before they were offloaded to tape. In that sense, it ticked all the boxes and it's been working fine for that.

Now, I'm moving on to StoreOnce, but I'm going to repurpose the Apollos after this. I don't know what I'm going to use them for after this, because DPM is gone. Moving on to Veeam and StoreOnce.

It's really very clever the way it manages to hide the disks away. This idea of pulling out the little trays, I just think that's really, really clever. It's very reliable. I haven't had a single failure at all in the year and a half; not the slightest problem with it. It's been a pretty good product so far.

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 ended up having a few issues because I ran out of space. There was a huge lead time while I waited for new disks to arrive here. It left me a bit exposed there for awhile.

But that's the only criticism. Other than that, I think it's a great product. It's really good. Really reliable. Very cleverly designed and I can't think of what better way they could pack more disks into such a small space, so all around it's a good product.

If I get through to the right person, support is very, very good. If I don't get through to the right person, it can be irritating and it can be cumbersome. So to me, the key is getting straight through to the person that's going to be able to help. I don't ring up for Mickey Mouse things. I just ring up when I need something bulked. I try my best to automate as much of the call logging because I have a lot of calls; it's much easier for me to do that online.

So that element generally works quite well, and generally I like the way it works. If I get a call logged online, it usually goes through to the right person, and I usually get a call back. I get actions done pretty quickly on that.

If, however, for whatever reason I have to ring up, I might get through to the wrong section. I've had some hit and miss affairs that have just irritated me. But when I do get through to the right person, I've found in the past, they're very good, generally speaking.

The Apollo was very straightforward. That was nice and easy. Some of my other products, my 3PARs and so on, a lot more complex. But the Apollo, that was nice and straight, easy.

We use the Apollo system for most of our branch offices. Our roadmap is to implement Apollo in all our branch offices by the end of 2018. So we will have something like 50 branch offices with Apollo.

We performed a PoC. We were very happy with it, so we decided to implement it in all the branches.

It's a compact system. 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. So it provides enough performance in terms storage value. And the internal network, we are also very happy with it. So, for the branches for us, it's perfect.

The benefit is, as I said, we are compressing everything. In the past, we used StorageWorks P2000, plus SAN switches, plus three or four servers and so on. Now, we have two-rack units for everything. 

For a branch it's perfect because it's simplifying our life.

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

Touch wood, it's perfect until now. Nothing to complain about.

We are not using it in that manner. We are not using it for the scalability. So the size, one Apollo for each branch, is perfect for us. We are not thinking about scalability.

As usual, with HPE, we are very happy with the support. Honestly, we used it only once for the Apollo system, but all our kits are HPE. So we use their support often and we haven't noticed any difference between Apollo versus C7000 or DL servers. So it's in line with the standard HPE support and we are happy with that.

We have a strong relationship with HPE. So HPE was proactive in proposing this solution. We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it. It satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution.

It was straightforward.

We always have an HPE engineer on our site, close to us. But usually, we prefer to do this kind of setup, at least the first time, to put our hands on the device itself, by ourselves. So the setup was done 95% without the support of this engineer. And maybe 5% for optimization with the support of this guy.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include, of course, the experience of the technician, then the support. With HPE as I said, we have a strong relationship. So there is a priority channel for HPE versus other vendors. We always perform a PoC, we compare the vendors. But we were happy with HPE so we have no reason to change right now.

I rate it eight out of 10 right now. It will be a 10 when SimpliVity will be on top of it.

We have been working with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for around ten years. They are picking the hardware and they had picked this hybrid system. It has several different kinds of components in the system and we had worked with them for a long time. We knew that they were picking the stake of that stuff so that's why we selected this solution.

It's very hard for a professor to amass the supercomputing resources, so I've been very fortunate to have that level of supercomputing at our disposal and that has really enabled us to do the world's leading superhuman AI research. That is what we did, we actually beat the best heads up in all Texas, holding human players in the world this January. So, we're at a superhuman level in the strategic reasoning.

One thing that we are looking for is the better stability of the Lustre file system, it could be improved. I have heard that they are coming out with a better memory bandwidth, so that's good or maybe, it's already there in System 10.

In that case, of course, then there is need for more CPUs, more storage and all of that.

It has been fairly reliable. In the beginning, of course not, but then we were a “baiter customer”, so in the beginning, there was nothing, literally there was nothing in the racks. We've been with it from the beginning and of course, in the beginning, it was less stable. However, it became more stable over time.

If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system. I would say that they have made some improvements with that but this is not just a problem with bridges. We have computed the other supercomputing centers like San Diego Supercomputing Center in the past as well and Lustre seems to be just a little bit unstable overall.

It's going to meet our needs moving forward, it is scalable. Having said that, our algorithms are very compute-hungry and storage-hungry, so more is more and there's no limit as to how much our algorithms can use. The more compute and the more storage they have, the better they will perform.

I would support the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) support; they gave us the support and their support has been awesome. We don't directly contact HPE, they contact HPE if needed.

The PSC installed everything, i.e., both hardware and software. So we didn't do any of that; from our perspective, it has been easy to use.

Whilst looking for a vendor, we do not look at the brand name at all. Instead what we look for are just reliability and raw horsepower.

It has been great. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center guys have been great in supporting us very quickly and sometimes even at night or on weekends. I've been very fortunate as a professor to get this level of supercomputing, so we've been able to do the world's leading research in this area. The only things that I would improve are the ones that I have mentioned before, i.e., the Lustre file system, and maybe, the memory access from the CPU.