HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The features that are the most valuable to us are its scalability, performance, and cost. It's also very easy to use, which is a huge advantage for our IT department.

The biggest improvement to our organization is that we can now expand our IT infrastructure easily. We can seamlessly implement additional IT assets if we want, whether that's to execute different plans or to remain consistent in our operations. We can changes things as we need to as we go along. With blades, it's a lot simpler for us to deploy, expand, and virtualize.

It lacks a reboot service when the firmware breaks and needs upgrading. It also needs easier installation.

We have no issues with deployment.

We had a few past issues, but they were mostly the result of old firmware versions and our fear of upgrading them in time.

It's very scalable as we keep adding more blades as needed. With one enclosure, we can have 16 blades or just three. I don't think we'll ever go back to the old DL3x.

Technical support is good. We initially went with a partner for support, but we now use HP services for going live of some environments, especially around some light-wear blades.

The initial setup was complicated. You have to understand your environment before you let yourself expand through it.

We're an HP shop with hardware and software, so we stick with them for all our IT.

Plan, plan, and plan some more. Really understand what you want to do because it can be a great integration opportunity. Make sure you work with a partner who understands your infrastructure well. Understand also how products from different vendors like NetApp, EMC, Cisco, etc. work together, especially with different firmware versions.

I'd say it's the turn-to provision as a replacement server in our consolidated fiscal data center. It comports with our general rule of consolidation and flexibility quite nicely.

BladeSystem has allowed us to create our own service area or banking area. We're able to provide a platform where we can start offering services back to the various groups within our organization and our external customers as well.

I think some improvements could be made on the switching side. We just transitioned from the Cisco 3120 switches, which were at end-of-line, to the HP switches, but only because they were the only option for the HP blades. That gave us a bit of a minor challenge from a skills and networking team perspective.

We've used it for eight months.

Deployment has been issue-free for us.

It's a really good system. I've used it before with previous companies as well, and we've had no stability problems.

We're just about to purchase our second place in the primary site. I expect to be able to scale.

From previous experience, technical support is very good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We also considered Dell. We had a big conversation over what to do and ultimately decided to get something that could cover a huge service area. The best thing for us, we determined, was to go with HP servers. They fit our needs the best.

It will change your operations. It's a good option you should consider.

We use these chassis with Gen8 and Gen9 servers, Blade servers for virtualization, VMware servers.

They are reliable, and it's relatively easy to manage them. They also regularly provide patching for the servers. It's quite a good product.

HPE has told us that the c7000 will no longer be part of its portfolio, so I don't think so they will provide any new features. But if I had to say something it would be some features from the Synergy. They could go to a converged system with the c7000, so everything would be automatic in the system.

It's reliable. 

The problem is that when want to expand with a new chassis, you have to do everything manually. It's not automatic.

We have good support from HPE.

I don't know what the previous solution was, but in our company every four or five years we have a renewal process for the older systems. That was probably the reason for the switch.

For me, when selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are that the system must be reliable, and the support as well. The support is very important because we have a lot of business-critical servers and if something goes wrong with the hardware we need the support.

If you don't want to go to the new technologies, like hyperconverged systems or converged systems, if you want to use only the old-school technologies, I can recommend this solution.

I rate it at eight out of 10. It's a good product, it's reliable, the performance is good. You can expand with the new servers as well. It has been a leading product in the market until now.

The product's stability, robustness, and support for Integrity blades were valuable because we ran 24x7x365 operations.

The product allowed us to save physical space and energy. Initially, we only bought this product to use Integrity blades. Eventually we used the vacant slots for HP x86 blades, which we used for Vsphere. This decision allowed us to save even more physical space.

I have used this solution for 11 years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

In general, I did not encounter any issues with scalability. Though we did run into incompatibility issues with a recent blade purchase that was incompatible with our existing fiber channel ports.

Technical support is great pre-sales. Technical support is also great for troubleshooting post-sales, but only if you speak with a high-level tech support professional. Their first-level tech support professionals are not great.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was a turn-key installation.

We did not evaluate other options for the blade system. However we did evaluate other options/vendors for the storage system.

The x86 blades and Vsphere implementation is relatively easy. The C7000 supports newer HP blades. The product is very robust and we have not experienced downtime within the last 11 years of use.

The most valuable feature, of course, is its size as I can build a huge compute resource on it.

A couple of those HPE BladeSystem Enclosures can give you a stable and distributed compute resource for a virtual environment.

First of all, there should be a change in the disk bay. Currently, in the case of a disk failure there is a need to remove the whole bay and as a result, to disconnect all the other disks.

I have used this solution for maybe more than four years.

I have encountered a major issue with VMware on Gen8. There is no support for NetQueue, that resulted in network issues with the VMs.

There were no scalability issues.

I was not satisfied with the support. It seems that the support team does not know their products in depth. Their main approach is to upgrade the firmware/drivers and replace the hardware. They are struggling in giving any type of technical explanation for resolving issues. But, there are not many issues that were not addressed by the support team and I always received a solution this way or another.

I have used this HPE Enclosure as a part of the design; we are using this solution from the beginning and have not switched to it from any another solution.

The setup is not simple but if the low-level design is correct, then it is a straightforward implementation.

Their licensing program is pretty simple.

We evaluated other products such as Dell and Cisco Blade Servers.

Pay attention to the HPE's management solution as they are securing the management interfaces of their servers. You need to implement it correctly, otherwise, in a case of a failure, for example, an incorrect network configuration may result in complete loss of the management.

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.

Being modular and being able to replace parts as needed, is easy without taking systems down.

Less real estate - that's pretty much it. Manpower and time, and even resources, electricity. Bills go down because of BladeSystems.

Better pricing is always a plus.

It does its job, I haven't had any major problems with it.

It's scalable.

I haven't used it but my colleagues who have haven't had any issues with them.

It's pretty scalable, but then again, it's pretty old. It's not as scalable as the Cisco Blades that we currently have, but I'm not going to knock it because of that, it's just because it's old it doesn't have all the technology that Cisco has right now.

Do your homework. Shop around and look at other vendors. Don't just look at one specific blade system.