HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The HPE BladeSystem c7000 is very convenient for virtualization. We have virtualized about forty Blade servers. It is easy to manage and has ideal server density.

HPE Blade system has the ideal server density that saves your data center space and reduces cable traffic in cabinets.

With just one cable, for redundancy it's around two, you can feed sixteen servers in a single c7000 chassis.

The only side that must be improved is the active-passive interconnect module architecture. This blocks interconnects so that they can be upgraded simultaneously.

The scalability is very flexible. You are not limited to any spec like server type, network, or fiber module differences.

HPE's customer service is almost perfect, they are number one, at least in this class.

The initial setup is not so complex, but regardless I strongly advise you to get vendor support.

For anybody planning to use the c7000 for virtualization, I strongly advise you to use half-height servers. This gives the advantage of using sixteen Blades in a single chassis.

I think the most valuable features that my management usually worries about are price, reliability, and its ability to be repaired and/or debugged.

What would make it better from my point of view is if HPE spent more time on testing with the actual built-in Red Hat Linux drivers, as opposed to always trying to say, "Use our driver."

The stability is pretty good.

It's scaling where we need to go.

The technical support sucks, would be understating it. Because the first line and the second line support tend to give out stupid suggestions that are completely useless, and they aren't listening to anything. It takes a lot of time to get through them, and that is every call I've been on with them. Oftentimes, I've got a very low expectation of HPE, and they go below my expectation a few times.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

I really value the FlexFabric interconnects.

HPE BladeSystem was introduced by me as an architect to boost the performance/server footprint, especially with VMware virtualization.

The storage blades could be improved.

I have used it for eleven years.

There were stability issues in the early versions, Blades G1.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We used rack mounted servers.

The initial setup was straightforward using a wizard.

The customer has to decide and evaluate the tradeoff between CAPEX and OPEX.

We evaluated the IBM Blades System.

Examine your infrastructure KPIs. This will typically include analyzing a reduction in OPEX, ease of operation, ease of troubleshoot, decreasing cabling, and increasing footprint performance.

• Easy to add new blades
• No additional cabling required for network or FC
• Nice single point of management
• Easy portal

It has given us a much reduced server footprint with a subsequent reduction in cabling and a lower carbon footprint.

• Ability to zoom in on the blade system graphic
• Easy way of reporting all the blades at once

This has been in use for three years.

In three years, we have not had any issues with enclosures nor with server instability.

We have had no issues with scalability. We have added ProLiant servers to the chassis which shares storage.

Technical support is great, once you get to it

We previously had rack-mounted HP-UX servers. Our hardware refresh dictated that we move to blade systems in order to keep using HP-UX systems.

It was a very straightforward migration.

Ensure that you use virtual connect modules. It is well worth the extra cost over traditional switches.

Always go for virtual connect modules from the outset.

We migrated our entire legacy landscape from old HP Superdome infrastructure to the new x86 infrastructure on blades. In terms of application portability, it was a seamless project from my side.

The main benefit has been in terms of the newer platform having much more computer power. You can see your workloads completing much quicker. Users with feedback in terms of workload performance have reported that a job that typically took 3 or 4 hours to run took a few minutes.

We're busy with phase 2 of the project. We classify the legacy landscape into simple, medium and complex applications. We've done the simple and medium. We're now going to tackle the complex and will make use of HPE professional services to see how we can either modernize the application code, for which we don't have the skill set anymore, or some subset of the applications.

In terms of platform stability, the legacy infrastructure was out of warranty and out of support. The new platform was much more stable and reliable.

We have not used technical support often. HPE worked closely with us on the project. It was a joint initiative. We never had any issues and customers didn't even know they were migrated.

We're a telecom company. We've standardized around HPE, IBM, Oracle Solaris Sun boxes and now we've got VCE Vblocks. In terms of percentage, HPE's still about 60% of our landscape.

We moved to an x86 infrastructure and we could probably move other workloads from IBM-related infrastructure across to an HPE infrastructure. We could standardize further, but from an x86 perspective, it becomes more or less agnostic regarding which vendor infrastructure is the underlying infrastructure; as long as the operating system and virtualization can take place on top.

It did take us quite some time to make the business case and to get the funding, but once we got all of that, the project went smoothly. We never had any issues.

For the technical part of the setup, we brought in professional services from HPE and they did the initial configuration and the racking and stacking of the systems.

We were looking at VCE Vblock, HPE, Oracle and IBM. We went with HPE because the HPE platform is about 60%, IBM is about 10%, and Oracle is about 30%.

We're based in South Africa and we're pretty much dependent on the OEM to help us and advise us. HPE is able to advise us, especially on the architectural designs they can actually vet the architectural designs and give input that has proven to be valuable to us.

We always try to check supportability of the platform post-project implementation. Trust me, before the project implementation, before they kick up, all the vendors will lobby. Obviously, when you’ve gone live and you start having problems after the fact, the vendors stay far away. So you need to make sure that in-country support is there and the skills are there. For example, we had an experience with Oracle where they didn't even have the skill sets at the right support levels.

The integration with our existing environment, and it's ease of use are valuable.

We went from traditional rack servers, consolidated to blades, making management easier. However, we required better capacity planning due to "blade server" lock-in.

It needs to be easier to help build OpenStack solutions. It is also lacking container integration which would make adoption easier.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Excellent pre-sales, working both with HP and a VAR, and after sales technical support was good after the first level.

We had used HP rack servers previously.

It was easy. We leveraged VAR resources to help get up to speed with some skills training after installation.

Vendor assistance is a good idea if you are transition from rack mount servers to blades. Some hand-holding is required, but not much.

There wasn't much of a change for our pricing/licensing costs. However, we did have an increase in CPU power meaning there was reduction in the number of CPUs which lowered the hypervisor/socket pricing.

Go big or go home, pick a solution, and go with it. There is no wrong way to go - whether you choose rack or blade servers depends on how you grow, and how you want to plan your future capacity.

We use BladeSystem is something that we use simply as hardware that is very reliable.  

The most valuable thing about BladeSystem is just like the purpose of the product: it is reliable hardware.  

What we want to improve would be to add more management capability for BladeSystem to be integrated with a cloud platform in a hybrid model.  

Another point to improve. There are sometimes problems with laptops having issues in connecting with virtual connections to the database. The virtual connections can be improved.  

We have been using HPE BladeSystem for a long time. We have always worked with HP it has been between five to ten years working with their products.  

BladeSystem is a very stable solution.  

As it is the hardware that all the applications are running on, it is not like software. You know what you are using and the capacity, it is not like scaling the number of users. The capability of the hardware can be upgraded and more blades can be added. So it is scalable. We are definitely going to continue to use this product and we will scale it as needed.  

The technical support is very good. Generally, we use a subcontractor to do a lot of the things that we require. If they need to, they can contact HPE and work with them. There do not seem to be any issues working this way.  

I have used a lot of products so, I would have to make a long list of products here. It is probably good enough to know that from all of them, we have chosen to work with HPE. We feel it is the best fit and the most reliable product that we can use and it is a reasonable price.  

The installation is very straight forward. We set up the hardware and there is nothing unique or complicated.  

The amount of time the deployment takes depends on the number of servers that need to be deployed. For the typical deployment, we have an HPE engineer on site. For each server it is very quick, let's say one week. The complexity is not very high.  

Ordinarily, we work with a general contractor such as an integrator of a consultant, but that is assuming we have a new deployment.  

It is not expensive, really, in this class of server products, but as a customer, we always hope that the pricing could be lower.  

I would recommend this product for other users who wants to start using it. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate HPE BladeSystem as an eight-out-of-ten.  

The product can be improved and earn a higher rating by improving virtual connection integration, maybe lowering the cost (without degrading the quality of the product), and having a dedicated contact with HP for some critical issues if they arise.  

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.