HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The HPE BladeSystem is a very stable system. We use them in our data centres for the design and development our systems. We're talking about hundreds of BladeSystems we have in place.

It is very convenient that we can assemble them like building blocks. We can just buy them and put them in the system. They are standard building blocks.

We would like to see faster processing and more memory.

BladeSystems are very stable.

Scalability is perfect.

We use technical support every now and then when we have some hardware problems and I think it's fine. Depending if it's a reseller or HPE itself. I would say in general it's okay.

We have been using BladeSystems for almost six years now. We didn’t really have a previous solution.

There's always a learning curve when you start with a new product. When you past the learning curve, then it's straightforward.

Have a serious look at this. It brings a lot of value for us. That tells enough. Our company is doing very well.

When selecting a vendor, the pricing must be okay. But next to the pricing, I want to see a long term road map and know that they will be a trusted partner.

To us, the most valuable feature is space. It's the much smaller footprint of having eight, 10, or 12 blade servers, as opposed to having 10 bigger servers in place. There is also a power savings.

• It enables us to expand easily. The whole blade center's a very plug-and-play type system so we can expand rapidly and increase our farms easily.
• There are performance benefits to it as well. We've moved up generations of servers with the blade environment.
• It's very flexible.

We know that the blade centers probably have a limited life span now. It probably has five years left. Having invested in it, we would like to be able to keep it with new generations of servers, new generations of blades, faster processors, and so on.

The next real release of the solution has been replaced by Synergy in pretty much every scenario. It's the composable workspace, which is part of the environment in which you can actually make resources available at the touch of a hat; and automatically spin up more disks and more servers. This is currently available, but it's kind of like a next-generation product. I don’t think it will ever make it into a this-generation product, but it would be nice.

So far, I've had no real stability problems, so it's been good for us. We renewed our licenses about two years ago. I don't think I've ever seen a single error since.

It is excellent on scalability.

We used technical support on one or two of the upgrades we did. The technical support was very good.

HPE was in the company when I joined them; but I've used HPE in multiple different companies over many years now.

We were previously using HPE DL380s, but it was as standalone servers. We managed to take out about 10 or 12 standalone servers, and replace them with eight blades. It took up less than half the rack space.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I've done most of the design work and specifications, but we actually brought in a third-party company to actually do the installation, and worked with them to do it. That all went nice and smoothly.

We didn’t really look at other vendors. We did briefly look at Dell, and some others, but HPE being HPE, it was a “no choice” scenario. It is a really, really good solution.

From my experience with HPE and the BladeSystem, I could obviously recommend it. We’ve had no problems or issues.

The most valuable features are that it:

• Is compact
• Integrates the infrastructure
• Is easy to configure
• Is easy to manage

It saves us a lot of space, supplies, and amenities. That is important for us. The performance of the system is very good.

We would like to see a more compact and more powerful solution.

We have not had any problems with stability so far.

The scalability is great.

We have only used technical support for the initial installation. They were very professional.

We were using a similar solution from other vendors, but we found that HPE is much better.

It was a straightforward installation.

What's most important is to have really good, reliable professionals. You want really good support. We were looking at a couple of vendors, but HPE at that time had a good local presence. They were very good at representing their solutions. They had really good experts, so everything was perfect. They are a good vendor.

The blades have been reliable. They are powerful and flexible. Those are the key features for me.

Reliability means more uptime. We don't get so much dysfunction in the business. Flexibility and memory are good. Managing has been fairly straightforward. It's got a good interface to manage. I don’t have anything bad to say.

There is nothing much to improve, so long as they carry on with the basics of user views and reliability. There have been steady improvements, but not drastic ones. We have seen steady improvements which have been good for us.

All good.

All good.

I have used it occasionally. It's “okay-ish”. It's always a pain going through the first line of support, particularly when you know what the problem is. You still have to go through all the formalities. I get the answers I need eventually. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, or you have to go through more steps than you hoped for. In the end, they get to it. It probably has a few more layers than other technical support I’ve used. I have been able to get to engineers faster and more directly with other vendors.

I was involved in the setup. It was good. We had someone from HPE come in to help us and that was useful. You have to learn the product and use it. It was a straightforward installation.

We've got Dell blades. I'm a little bit more biased because I've used them and I'm more familiar with them. I still prefer the HPE blades. We chose HPE over Dell because the interface manager seemed more intuitive with HPE. Dell didn't seem to put it together as well.

For what we use blades for, it was, and still is, the best solution. Although this is a great solution, you still need to look at the rest of the infrastructure to make the most of it. It's not just blades. You have to look at networking. You have to look at your storage in order to make the most use of it. It's taken us a more time to realize this. You want a whole solution. You have to look at it from end-to-end.

We can better maintain physical servers and takes up only half the cabinet space. We have from 8-16 physical servers in one chassis, so it's better for maintenance in case of hardware failure on one of these BladeSystems. We get higher density and better hardware maintenance.

More physical resources can be added to our pool with better maintenance.

I would like to see a better UI for configuring the VDX switches.

We are very satisfied with the stability.

For scalability, it is better to work withHPE Apollo servers, which is not what we are using. I think HPE provides all the products that work better and quicker.

Technical support is very good.

We were using older generation HP BladeSystems. We switched to the new version, because we needed more capacity. We were satisfied already with the existing BladeSystem, so we wanted to continue using it and went with the latest generation available.

Initial setup is straightforward for the physical servers, but took a bit more time to configure the virtual connect switches inside the chassis.

The price is affordable for what we want in new physical resources.

We looked at Dell and Quanta. HPE has very good technical support and that makes a difference; at least compared with Quanta for instance.

List what you need regarding new capacities of:

• RAM memory
• CPU power
• Your budget
• High availability limitation
• Support

We want a vendor to provide support for any hardware failure. They need to be able to respond quickly and so we can recover from a hardware failure and put it back into production.

At a very high level, it gives us flexibility. Being on a virtual system, you can upgrade or downgrade, depending on the performance we need for all our different applications. We've had situations where we've had downtime, but our application state hasn't been affected because it moved on to the rest of the blades. And then we've switched the faulty blades when we've needed.

At a very high level, what it does is it gives us the ability to scale up. It gives us redundancy. It's cost efficient in that sense.

As I’ve mentioned, the benefits are flexibility and the fact that we can scale up our environment as and when we want to.

I'm probably not the right person to provide any information, but I guess I would like to see monitoring, real-time monitoring of the performance of the estate. We do basic monitoring of our estate. I'm not sure how robust it is, whether it can see into the future and understand where there are faults occurring.

From an application point of view, I want to avoid redundancy as much as possible, and I want to avoid downtime. I want general performance. Anything that helps that situation would be best.

I haven’t rated it higher because of stability and monitoring capability.

We've been using it for a while now. We've been using it for about four or five years, and we've probably had about three or four critical incidents. Over five years, that’s not too bad.

Blades have malfunctioned, so we’ve had to switch over. Physically, those blades have had to be replaced.

Every three or four years, we review our hardware estate. We're going through a process right now to increase the capacity in our estate. We do a complete application review and we understand what infrastructure environment is needed to support that.

We get good service from our reseller; I rate them 7/10.

Do your ground work. Understand not only what you need right now but what you need in the future because technology's changing and evolving. Do a fairly good due diligence about what your estate will be needed for the next couple of years, in the future.

Look around. Shop around with multiple resellers to get the best price.

The HPE BladeSystem is a universal platform for server infrastructure. It is easy to manage and to connect to your other infrastructure, fiber channel network, and so on.

It's mainly focused on management and reliability. It's a fairly reliable platform, almost no outages. It works perfectly.

It could be improved in terms of management, in terms of uptime. When you do the firmware upgrades, it's not acceptable; we have downtime issues. It’s not good with that, but it's getting better and better.

We have been working with HPE BladeSystem C7000 since 2007. Until recently, the firmware updates on the connectivity modules (FC and Ethernet) and Virtual Connect could not be done without downtime. For an enterprise system, this is not acceptable. It is only since last year that we did the first online upgrades without any downtime.

It's very stable; just minor issues; no big issues.

You scale within the enclosure. You get 16 servers and then you can buy extra enclosures. It's scalable.

Technical support is OK. I'm not directly working with support myself, just indirectly. But from what I hear from the engineers, it's OK.

We previously used other HPE servers, just the old ProLiant servers and other lines. We converted to BladeSystems and these products.

Initial setup is quite complex. You have to think before you start.

We chose this solution quite a long time ago. I don’t remember what else we considered. We chose HPE because we were already an HPE customer.

Invest in preparation. The HPE BladeSystems are being succeeded by the Synergy systems, announced last year. That's the successor, so look at that.

We like the wire once approach. We've had to do very little maintenance on the backend connectivity components. We really have been able to basically leave our fiber and Ethernet connections alone. I think in our ten years on two BladeSystem enclosures, we've done one infield upgrade, to raise our capacity limits on Ethernet and fiber channel. But really, the same enclosures have been doing fantastic for that entire time.

We had a lot of work to do from a management perspective as an administrator to ensure that we had the correct firmware and driver levels, and things like that, between servers. HPE fixed that when they introduced the service pack for ProLiant. OneView has expanded the idea of server profiles and added some additional management ease - including the ability to define firmware levels for blades - the way that a Cisco UCS blade does.

We've been a BladeSystem customer for over 10 years.

The ecosystem of software the comes with HPE blade has been lacking. HPE's Rapid Deployment Pack (was rebranded Altiris when I used it) is clunky solution for imaging blades and it may have been replaced. Sometimes the NPIV makes it difficult to find WWN in the fibre channel SAN when bringing a new blade online.

Early on, I would say that it wasn't stable. Today, however they test all of the firmware and drivers together now, so when we do a deployment or upgrade for firmware, that service pack has been integration tested across all of the different generations and hardware components, so we've gotten a lot more stability out of the solution since they made that change, and that's something I will say across multiple different solutions. Sometimes if they identify a problem like that as a partner, they tend to try to correct it. It may take them some time to get it corrected, but we went through the same sort of thing with StoreOnce ... Early on we had some issues with the software releases and there were some inefficiencies that in a couple generations they had it worked out and they listened to customer feedback. They try to integrate that into their solutions. That's one of the things that keeps us as an HPE customer, because we do feel that communication and feedback gets heard.

Multiple enclosures at scale can introduce challenges. That's one of the downsides of a ten year old technology. HPE is working on new solutions to really hit scale issues that they have encountered with BladeSystem, but it works fine for us. We are a small to medium sized enterprise, so we've not encountered any major issues with scalability where we are at, but we are running one enclosure per sight, so we're not really trying to do scale things.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

BladeSystem setup was one of my first projects when I joined the company, there was a learning curve to it. It really actually was fairly straightforward except we were trying to do everything boot from SAN, and that added some complexity and learning curve. The actual hardware solution - it was fairly straightforward and made a lot of sense. Blades were brand new back then too, so it was a foreign concept, but it wasn't terrible. I would say maybe a a six out of ten or something initially, but if I had to do it now, it's probably a lot easier.

It really gets the job done well. It's dense compute. We replaced an entire rack of equipment with ten use, twelve use, I can't remember how many use it is, but with a single BladeSystem. It has been a long-sustaining enclosure. We have field upgraded the interconnects twice to add new capabilities as technology changed and those were service affecting but not very difficult. I have worked with Cisco UCS Manager and both have similar concepts. HPE Synergy is also due to launch soon, and althought HPE has a commitment to BladeSystem for the next few years, Synergy is really their next generation of blade technology.

It really gets the job done. The management is easy, it's been easy from an upgrade perspective and maintenance. So, it works really well for us.