HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The reliability of the BladeSystem, as we've used them for a long time, and the chassis/blades are backwards compatible. I know they're moving to a new BladeCenter, but over time I've seen the reliability with it versus other vendors, so for me that's what it comes down to.

It's the density of the compute power that you get. We've taken the ones that we can, some of the ProLiant systems, and condensed them down into blades. This has helped to reduce are footprint - reducing power consumption and cooling consumption Also, just being able to manage everything from one BladeCenter makes administration costs go down.

I haven't seen it lately, but I know with OneView, there are still some limitations. It was because the product roll-out last year was still kind of catching on and still kind of debugging, but I think once that gets some maturity and growth, I think that's going to be continued on the right track.

We integrate multiple power supplies. We have redundancy on the back plane with different mezzanines and things like that. It's been very stable. I would have to say on the ProLiant side, where we do have something running that's critical, it's a DNS function on there, there's always a backup. What we can't do maybe through hardware because it's a one chassis, we'll do through software as well to bring clustering and things like that.

We have technical account managers, and we call them to handle any kind of maintenance agreement or things like that, and have had very good support from them. If there's something that they can't answer, they're always willing to reach back and get the right point of contact. We've had very good dealings with our technical account manager and technical support.

It was never really a big risk for us, because we've been on HPE for a while, so getting to the new system was pretty low risk, and when it came time to do the migration or the upgrades to stuff, it's always been kind of non-eventful. We've never tried to minimize what we're doing, but we take precautions like calling HPE ahead of time, making sure that there's support there, that they're aware of when we're doing a migration so if anything goes wrong, they're there to support us. We haven't had any issues with that.

If we could get the cost down that would be good.

I did a trade study on this, I think HP has a big offering in terms of the number of blades that they offer and the amount of blades they can fit in a chassis, so I think they're actually ahead of the game compared to IBM and Sun/Oracle, and some of the other ones I've seen with Dell. I would say HPE is probably at the top of that game.

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.

The BladeSystem with the manageability and the reliability of the BladeSystem. I used to work for HPE and with the ProLiant line so now we're pretty loyal to HPE servers, and have been for several years.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

We pretty much use the blades for everything that we can. The only reason the rack mounts are still around is because we have some fax servers that need fax boards that don't fit in the blades and that's pretty much it.

We've had other vendors trying to pitch similar hardware to us but it's something we don't even consider just because of the stability and the reliability of the HPE hardware.

That's a non-issue for us. They're easy to scale especially with the blade chassis. We stack several of them into a rack, stick in more blades whenever we need to.

We don't use them very often. Usually we have a minor issue, a hard drive or something like that so we really don't use it very often but when we need to, it's always very good.

We kind of got in on the ground floor when the blades were first coming out. We decided to make the plunge just to save space and from there, we just fell in love with the blades. A lot of people have, with the space saving and they're just easier to configure than the rack mounts. You put in the blade chassis and you slide in the blades instead of having to rack 12 servers.

We looked at Cisco UCS but the manageability of it and learning a new product wasn't something we wanted to do. We also felt like these were still a superior product.

I would tell them to strongly take a look at the HPE. Go ahead and do a bake off if you want to. If they want to prove a concepts with the Dells, Dells will give them a way to you to try them out. If you rack them up side-by-side, I think all the features set and just the reliability of HPE makes them come out ahead.

Probably the biggest thing I like about it is how easy they are, how easy it is for me to use them as building blocks for whatever system I'm working on. Whether it's another node of VMware cluster or another Microsoft cluster, it's really easy for me to be able to do. I can move them real easy around my data center. They're heavy compute but really easy and functional to use.

For me the benefit is the expandability. I can basically fit 16-blade Chassis inside of a 10U location as opposed to 16 rack mounts would be 32U in my cabinet. It's a lot more power, so I can really shrink my data center down a lot and still provide the same level of complement.

There's a cost saving, as there's a smaller real estate. It's not necessarily less hardware, but it reduces the power and the cooling requirements within the data center and the space is what I need.

They're physically big, about 240 lbs, but it's a minimal issue. I just started to get a BladeSystem that works, and I'd like to to work a little bit more with the ConvergedSystem.

They're not cheap, and for me to buy one is about $75,000 before I put any sort of server inside of it. I'd like the costing to come down a little bit.

We did look at a few others in the past, we haven't in a long time. Obviously we are an HPE shop. We did look at the Dell blades, the IBM blades, even Cisco's UCS system as well for a while, so we did actually do the proper comparisons across everything.

We chose HPE as everyone already knew the systems, knew how they worked. Ultimately, going through the other systems, HPE was the easiest one to go in and just start setting up and configuring right away out of the gate.

Part of it is really going to depend on what your use case for it is. If it's just running general server pools, then you get in there really fast, get it set up, run it using OneView obviously, which makes life a lot easier, because then you've got a single pane of glass to manage all your environments. That's the big reason I would use it.

We used to have many physical servers spending energy and space in our data center. Now most of our servers are virtually running in a blade server infrastructure. We use the BladeSystem, ProLiant, and 3PAR for storage and we're trying to create a hybrid environment infrastructure. Also, OneView provides us with more visibility and you can manage what you can see.

It's about standardizing the infrastructure. Now we're only using one physical infrastructure and one software platform for the management.

It would be nice if it could integrate with cloud systems.

We never have downtime caused by this solution. Mainly when we have a downtime it's caused by a planned maintenance or something similar.

When we need to grow, we just buy another BladeSystem and ProLiant, then add it to the system. It's modular, so we can simply add in devices when we need.

We have a TS contract with an HPE partner.

We were using many different servers and we needed to standardize our infrastructure.

Tecnasa installed the system for us.

You will need to determine you parameters and your requirements so you can decide which products will best fit your needs.

• The space saving which has helped to reduce our cabling.
• It makes it a lot easier to bring up a new system. When a new blade comes in, we slide it in the chassis and we're done. I don't have to spend time wiring up a new server. It's just there, with my team spending less time racking something and getting it configured. We're just ready to go.
• It's the speed that which we can deploy new systems.

I would guess it crosses over as the reduced cost on real estate as if we've got less room, there's less cabinets we need to buy at a data center. I don't know that there's really a cost benefit from the hardware standpoint. A standalone server is going to be cost comparable to a blade, maybe even cheaper. I guess the business is going to save money by using less man hours to get it up and spend less money on real estate.

It'd come from a software standpoint - software support on the BladeSystem, particularly with Helion and OneView in that if you're using the Cisco fabric extenders instead of the HPE fabric extenders, there's a lot of functionality that you can't use. Because our network stack is Cisco, we can't do a lot of that automated provisioning of new blades because it's not supported. That's one thing that we'd really like to see HPE implement - true supportability of the Cisco fabric extenders.

The other thing is the support. With our initial purchase, we bought three chassis and maybe 15 or 20 blades. Out of that, we had probably a 20% failure rate within the first few weeks. It was really high and enough to make us concerned. We spent a lot of money on the chassis. We're married to them at this point since we don't want to throw the chassis away. The chassis were fine, but the blade servers themselves had a high failure rate, which didn't give us a lot of confidence.

Since then, everything's been fairly reliable, very few problems as of late, probably on the same frequency as we do with the rack mount servers. Whereas previously the rack mount servers never had a problem, Blades servers come with loads of problems. It could be completely anecdotal coincidence.

We haven't had to do a lot of technical support beyond that initial failure rate as it was resolved very quickly. If it's a bad memory issue or similar, the guys are out the same day, and have replaced the broken piece or the entire blade.

Deployment is easy. We just slide the blade in and put an OS on it and we're done. It's a lot easier than dealing with the rack mount servers and it is a lot faster.

The reliability, has gotten better; initially it was bad. I don't think there's anything bad to say at this point beyond those initial first impressions.

We looked at also using the Cisco UCS platform. The UCS I felt was more complicated than what we needed. Perhaps another customer might choose it over HPs, but the features that UCS had didn't appeal or apply to us. If you're standing up dozens and dozens of chassis on a daily or weekly basis, then maybe those copy/paste features in the Cisco systems would benefit. But for us, I like the simplicity of the HP BladeSystem. I liked it; all of our staff are already familiar with HPE hardware, so they knew they could take it apart and do whatever maintenance they needed to do. With the Cisco, it was learning curve that we didn't want to have to ramp through. We still use it because Cisco requires you to use their play systems for the phone products.

If you're somebody who's undergoing rapid growth and not standardized on a platform yet, then I'd tell you that it depends on your environment. If you're already an HPE customer, then I'm going to say your engineers already know it. If you're not deploying 1,000 chassis, then the simplicity of using the HPE blades, it's so familiar to rack mount, the management interface, it's almost identical if you know iLO then it's already there. It's easy to set up and it's much lower cost than Cisco.

• It's easy to perform an upgrade
• The failover solutions
• The blade enclosure system
• The way it's designed
• Failover for network connectivity
• Storage uplinks
• = it's a pretty solid system.

I really love the service. We have the HPE care packs - supported contracts are 24/7 response time. It's the piece of mind that if my hardware were to ever fail, I'd be back up and running quickly.

We've used it for a couple of years already and we're really happy with the product.

It's more about the redundancy. Like I said, their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers means the BladeSystem are a perfect fit for the company.

I believe there's a product called HPE OneView that I'm really interested in looking into. Right now we run off of iLO connections or we manage our servers through virtual connects. It would be nice to get them all unified into just one display and then monitor everything from there.

I've never had any issues with the BladeSystems. There's never been a situation where we were down completely. Actually, the experience has been pretty reassuring in that sense. I'm very comfortable with the product.

It's outstanding.

We've been an HPE shop for a while. We know the service that HPE offers, so there really wasn't a need to explore another company in regards to blade systems. We are happy with HPE, and for now we're going to stick with them.

The product is really simple to install. The way it's designed, you just slide whatever modules you're putting in there and it's pretty much done. HPE give it the iLO IP and you're ready to manage. Once you have it, there's not much advice I can give. It'll work and do the trick.

Reliability. I like the support that comes with it and the ease of getting it in production.

The reliability that is behind it, those efficiencies, that reliability makes sure that my customers have the services they need to support the business at all times.

Alerting the management could be better. I think OneView is new, I actually used HP SIM a lot in my day as an administrator. Now I'm in management watching my engineers use OneView. It still seems like there is still some room for improvement on that.

There have been issues but HP has always done a really good job at getting that corrected.

We run a virtual environment, a private cloud. As I need more computer power, we're able to add C7000 chassis Blade servers in, and just add those to the firm. It was relatively easy. It's getting it into production and then adding them into the cluster.

It was fine. It was pretty smooth.

We were using Cisco UCS and we recently made the change to HP BladeSystem. We changed because of the ease of use. The Cisco UCS platform was more complex to run, and I felt that with my experience with just HP stuff it was really easy to set up and manage and maintain.

It wasn't complex because I had prior experience using Blade servers at another company.

I would warn you to be prepared to be ready to talk about how you're going to be connecting your BladeSystems to the network. Especially if you don't have a total HP stack from top to bottom. For example, if you're setting those things up or connecting them with Cisco gear, being prepared in working with your partners with your vendors on ensuring that you're connecting that all in best practice.