HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The simplified design of the blades ensures a effeccient and repair including a replace in the event of a failure.

Improves capacity and aids organizations in adapting to their growth.

The profiles needs a complete rework, the way the profiles and networks are assigned to the blades isn’t user friendly and is often a hindrance

We've had no issues with the performance.

Excellent scalability, good flexibility from both a vertical and horizontal perspective.

 Consider implementing HP One-View into your environment to assist in addressing the complicated admin in some areas. Implement where possible a Use Standard to the chassis level, i.e. 1 chassis for hyper-v, 1 for SQL, etc... Segregate the networking set to the network where possible and avoid using the chassis profiles.

I think the c7000 platinum enclosure is really a great value for the money, especially for centralized data center management. It provides us with an advanced server management system that makes things work faster for our NOC and server administrator.

Firmware updates for system components are also valuable.

I would like to see improvement regarding scalability and deployment in the area of support. I simply mean seeing other fantastic features like built-in humidity or temperature sensors (especially for the market outside Europe and US). With technical support, I'm wondering if there could be some sort of seminar or webinar organised for users and prospective clients that may want to take a bake off on HPE BladeSystem.

The HPE BladeSystem is easy to manage. It is a fantastic product that datacenter managers, cloud services providers, and server room operators should embrace because it has all you could ever think of.

Probably the most value there is the compactness and the density you can get into the data center.

It would be nice if it could have better monitoring in terms of iLO and things like that. Some more interoperability between the different generations of blades.

Most recently, with some of our blades in our VDI environment we've had some stability issues. I don't know if that's a problem of HP or if it's a problem with HP with VMware and the VM-HP virtual connect on the backend of the Blade Chassis, but we have had issues in that environment.

We used VMware as a hypervisor on top of our BladeSystems, on our Blade Chassis, and on our blade server. It made it much more scalable for us to be able to spin up new architecture fairly quickly. What we've done is rolled back or moved, relocated some blades from one Chassis to another that didn't have virtual connect.

It's just as they always have been. They've been pretty solid in terms of technical support.

Most everything we had prior to building up our new data center was single server DL380s or 360 single servers. It would take too long to provision a DL380 to give people the access to a single server to be able to then do their development or build a new production environment.

We have a gentleman who's primarily our BladeSystem expert.

Make sure that if you're using it as a hypervisor, that you're doing all the pre-work on setup such as knowing the interoperability between different product statures that you're going to run on it.

I think the thing about BladeSystems is the quality of the engineering that goes into them. They have a long history of being valuable and viable products that are out there. Customers trust them.

It's interesting because I think, as infrastructure becomes more and more invisible and application becomes more and more important to the business, just not having to worry about that infrastructure is the value on a business level.

Customers are always looking for more performance, just trying to get more out of them. I don't know whether they have a blade or whether, but it's a rackmount server, and they're just trying to get more horsepower out of them. Continue to make them more scalable inside the box in terms of CPU, memory and I/O etc. It's just, customers are always looking for more density.

From the folks that I know that are using them, typically you're not seeing stuff at the infrastructure level. You may have some brittle pieces of the application and the integration, but the platform themselves are solid.

Architecturally, there's no problem adding more of those as the environment needs to scale.

I'm not that hands-on too much on the setup piece.

I think it's the advice that I'd give to anybody that would ask for it. Start with your application, find out what the requirements are, think about what it's going to need in the future, then begin architecting your solution there.

Valuable features include the speed at which you can deploy a system, the server profiles, and the ability to move those profiles around at will. We can also swap out hardware as needed, which is probably the saving grace for it.

Most of the issues that I have found have been addressed inside OneView. OneView 3.0 will allows us to do live migration of the Virtual Connect domains, so there isn’t anything big to improve at the moment.

We have used the product since it first came out and since generation one. We went from the P-class to the C-class because the P-class was not very good, and we haven’t had many issues since. Along the way, we went from pass-throughs to virtual-connects to FlexLOM and more, and everything has worked fine.

There were some issues with Virtual Connect not recognizing certain devices in OneView, but they have been addressed. Most issues are addressed quickly. We also use OneView to create the profiles on most of the new BladeServers that are Gen8 and higher. There are no issues with that.

It’s pretty scalable. I came from an environment that had 60 Blade enclosures. We went to Virtual Connect Enterprise for manageability, because the domains were locked to four when you did a stacking cable. There are some limits inside the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, but we couldn't find them.

HP support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HP stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set. I would also note that the migration from rack mount to BladeSystem is not a one-to-one, so read the manual.

The small footprint that they have, the reliability and the ease of use are key factors. We've been using them for probably 12 years now. I've been very happy with the product. We have them in a data center, so we have to pay for the power and space. That's two key factors, as far as pricing going, as far as why we wanted a small footprint.

We don't have to hire as many IT people because of the ease of use. That's key. With the smaller footprint, less power consumption, that saves money, and that's the bottom line.

I guess with its ease of use, as far as the configuration of the virtual switches, and things like that all need work. We just upgraded to 10 Gig on a couple of them, and the learning curve for me was a little tough on that.

It's easy. If we need to add servers, it's very simple. We don't add and subtract a lot of servers. Our environment is pretty stable. I'm not looking for hyper-quick deployment of servers and things like that. I will look into being able to get into where if a server fails, that profile can quickly go over to another profile on another server. That would be nice to have that feature.

We looked at Dell and Cisco, and we actually just re-evaluated them again last year. We decided to stick with the HP because we were happy with the product. I guess because I was the decision maker, and I've been happy with HP. Unless there was a real business reason to switch, and there wasn't, so we stuck with HP.

If you're considering it, you want to try out all the 3 big players. Then kind of just go with what feels right for you. I've tried out all three of them, and I've been happy, and the HP is the best. You just got to try it out and see what you think.

BladeSystem provides consolidation of hardware into single or more manageable components. Everything from FlexFabric, Virtual Connect, being able to manage your environment holistically from a single pane of glass, in terms of vCenter, and blade integration. I think the other thing is with HP's OneView, having another standardized management console to be able to manipulate pretty much everything from a blade's infrastructure component point of view as well as networking. Anything in the HP product line, the infrastructure can be managed through OneView.

There's definitely great advantages in the efficiency of time savings, both from a personnel perspective as well as the ability to quickly deliver on new offerings.

At the time, we were trying to learn the technologies while we were setting up the data center, and that's why we used professional services. We ended up having to collectively learn on the fly in setting up some of the new features we had. This was three years ago when we set up two new data centers and moved our operation out of an outsourced line of business.

It's been really stable, we haven't really seen any problems.

We've been expanding most of it, going with solid state storage has been the latest set of upgrades that we've done to it, and continuing to grow that. From a backup standpoint, we're also looking if we can start to use a lower tiered storage and use that to house all of the backups that we'll do, so we can get off using tapes as part of our whole strategy. We've got nine branch centers that ultimately are consolidating into the data center, so we're trying to fan those down into the data center and back them up.

In terms of the overall support, you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure related support personnel. If you're paying for enterprise level of support, and again, being such a foundation of your infrastructure, when there's issues they're usually critical, and the expectation is that you get immediate response. The experience that we've had is that sometimes you get right through to a qualified individual from to start, otherwise sometimes you have to play that escalation game, which in an emergency situation can be a little bit of a headache.

I would say sometimes it's hit or miss in terms of the kind of support you do get. Traditional hardware replacement, usually isn't a big deal. HP's remote support is really responsive in terms of hard drive failures, things of that nature. I find that the level of technicians that you get when you're calling in for any kind of technical support you may need, really does kind of vary. As an enterprise customer who's paying for enterprise level support, when you call, you call because you're in the middle of a catastrophe or you have an emergency situation that you're working through, so having to work through multiple tiers of technical individuals who may not have the necessary levels of strength, does not help the process.

We had HP Blades at the previous location, so we just bought the next generation of blades, but it was the same enclosure and some of it we did actually move across as we bought some initial hardware to seat things, and then as we freed up from our managed site we could then bring some of that technology across and continue to scale up in the new environment.

We did use some technical support, like through the professional services. We actually found some good, and some not so good, in terms of the expertise that we had. They didn't know enough. When we came around to setting up our VMs with the network they had, we had some challenges. There was a bit of a learning curve on both organizations. Not all positive.

I would say that the licensing model is probably the one biggest caveat I have. A lot of vendors provide a licensing model whereby you have to license the different functionality and feature sets that you want, but I think that for a lot of customers that's a bit of a stumbling block because you may not always be able to, upfront, understand or know exactly what you want to utilize, and have to make that additional investment later, when the dollars may not be there, is a little bit difficult.

If you're looking for a unified management interface where you can manage multiple products through a single pane of glass, like OneView for example, it might make sense. If you're heavily invested in the HP product line, again, it might make sense. But really in this day and age, computing is computing for the most part, so I think it really depends on what influences your purchasing decision, whether it's politics or technical merit.

Bottom line dollar is a big thing for a company like us. The ability to manage more infrastructure with less resources. When you get in a blade environment, you can do so much more management administration across a bigger scale.

BladeSystem was a huge improvement over rack. We gained an awful lot of productivity when we went to BladeSystem, because we can set up so much infrastructure in one swipe. Then you've got networking capability and storage capability. It really made life simpler.

The stability is key, because I'm talking about the server space. On the workstation space, we have dabbled with some lower cost providers in the past like Acer. Reply, which is probably a company you've never heard of, but I've been in my company a long time. We started out with IBM which was micro-channel architecture. We looked at other architectures, and we found less expensive ones. It ended up being a failed experiment after three to four years, because there's other costs involved. The stability and HP's ability or any big provider, HP's ability to bring us new product in a timely manner is very important in choosing your technology partner.

When we buy an enclosure, our company puts a seven-year life span on it. We expect to have two iterations of blade servers in that enclosure before the enclosure itself goes out to the scrap heap. That's another way that we look at it as a good, long-term investment.

We try to keep a blade server on a three-year lifecycle. When that one's ready to come out of that slot in the rack, you can pull out a G64-60, and you can put in a different architecture as long as it's a single form factor. I like that scalability real well.

I'm not real happy with their tech support. I wish I had better access. For the level of customer that we are and the amount we spend with HPE, I wish I had better access. I feel like I'm going through the same telephone portal that somebody with a home laptop with an HP logo on it, I don't feel like I'm treated as a valued customer.

We've certainly looked at other providers in the past. We know Dell's out there. We know IBM's out there.

We were Compaq users before HPE really got into the server space. That acquisition was 10 or so years ago. Due to our relationship with Compaq, we inherited HP as our primary provider of server hardware in the X86 space.

It's a good product. As I said, the support isn't the best, but it's a good product. We run them to death. We're supposed to run them for three years, but we have server hardware that's been running six years around the clock.

Also, I'd go back to my earlier case on total cost of ownership, return on investment, and things like that. If I'm talking to somebody that's from a company on our scale, I'd say absolutely go for it. HP products may not necessarily make sense for somebody in a small business environment, but for all the reasons that make sense for a company the size of mine, I'd absolutely recommend it.