HPE BladeSystem Reviews

It's reliability. We're using VMware as the backbone on it. We have High Availability so if something happens to one it switches over to everything else. We've had it for about six or seven years with no problems. To me, that's the central core of our business, that we have that connected up to StoreVirtual SANs, but we also have it connected to other SANs, and everything works seamlessly. In fact we've got the C7000 and two C3000's running with two blades. So that gives us flexibility for each of our security zones.

For us, it's the flexibility. We have to look at every nickel, and what we've found is that with the virtualization, we can get a more bang for the buck. We're using everything to it's full potential, and for a number of years we had ProLiant DL380s in the racks and they might be using one application on it. If we can take that and move it into the BladeSystem, then we can run six, seven, or eight servers off of the BladeSystem, and then everything is a lot easier to manage. We've got blades in there and we've never had any issues with equipment. We like the flexibility of being able to make a change without having to go and buy an extra drive. The whole virtual infrastructure is wonderful.

There's some little nitty-picky things and we're still trying to figure out a couple of things in the background. For functionality and everything, it runs well.

There haven't been a lot of changes, and we like that. There are newer blades, and they work seamlessly with the others. We don't need to have somebody watching it everyday and all the time. We've seem systems in the past where you've had to dedicate a resource to watching your BladeSystem, SANs, or anything else. I don't want to say "Set it and forget it." It pretty much runs, so, we've been very happy there.

We can change anytime. We can add a blade, or add RAM. In fact we did a process last summer where we went and doubled the RAM in each of the blades. That was the one limitation we had, we don't have to go "Okay, well I've got a few Megs here, I've got a few Gigs here, I can move things around." Making the workload larger, or smaller everything works very well. We're not big on hyperconvergence, but we love the ability to be able to add and subtract if we need to.

We've contacted tech support on all three phases. I haven't always been impressed with getting some guy in India. I'm sure that's the biggest complaint everybody gets. They're very qualified guys there, but between trying to understand them is difficult. I did have an incident with my blade enclosure where some of it was telling me I had a critical error. I called over and the guy says, "Well, just receipt your onboard administrator." So I did, and it worked for five minutes, and they closed my ticket. But for the most part on other things, such as when a drive dies, we can call somebody and it's there.

We do have local guys that will come out and work on things if we need it, and we have taken advantage of that in the past. With any kind of technology, it's not going to be a hundred percent. But we've generally been very happy. We've got one guy in town that we kind of like a lot, except for when he screwed up one thing, but that's going to happen anyway. We've been happy with tech support.

What we had was many, many DL380 Proliants. I had a couple of them configured as VM hosts, and then we decided that to scale building, convergence, and the flexibility of what a BladeSystem could do for you made a lot of sense. It wasn't like I said something such as "Hey, I just want to buy a BladeSystem." But our vendor kind of walked us through all the benefits, and we were very happy with how it came out, and that's where we're going. Now we can't imagine doing business without it. We went from about twenty-five servers up to over a hundred. That would not be possible if I had to put a DL380 for each application. So just having the ability to have sixty servers in a two-by-two space is outstanding. That's been one of the biggest reasons why we went with it.

We have a vendor from here in Las Vegas who came up and helped put it together. I kind of watched over the shoulder and stayed out of the way, but that has been more or less my responsibility ever since. The setup was fairly easy. Ever since, any changes have been fairly easy to do.

We were moving from ProLiant, and we have a vendor who has a big HPE shop, and I think they sell more than anybody else in Nevada, and we've been very happy with them. They said, "Well, this is what you need." And we said, "Okay." The price was fair, and we thought, "Okay, we're going to do it." One of the troubles with our systems is we have to plan so far in advance on what we want to get that we kind of target something. We might look around a little bit right at the last minute, but in this case, the name HPE, the support we get from our people and HPE, and the price just made it that we had to go that way.

The density of servers and their racks, just being able to fit as much as we can in as small space as we can. This is important because our data center space is at a premium.

We have a large DSX infrastructure for VMWare and having it uniform and having it compact is a good thing for us. As we're moving forward towards using OneView I think that'll save us some FT there as well. The older tools weren't as easy to use. I went to a session on OneView and it looked a little bit more like something we were going to be able to take advantage of and save a lot of time and configuration.

I think some of the stuff may be fixed but one of the issues we have is firmware on virtual connects. There's a little bit of overlap on the timing that causes, you know, if you're not careful it can cause a short outage for the Blade System. I think that may be fixed with OneView management.

We're working on implemented OneView. We're just barely getting started. I think OneView is addressing a lot of the issues that we have, we haven't been able to get fully into it yet due to limited resources.

It's very stable.

So really the main thing we've had was just the firmware with virtual connects can be a little touchy. There's another tool, I can't even remember what it's called, you can do a command line and avoid the issue, talking to our hospitalier but we haven't had a chance so what we've kind of done is made a whole chassis of failure domain which is kind of a waste of resources on occasion to avoid that.

Well to be honest, I haven't ever used another BladeSystem from another vendor. Our organization has an HPE Direct as far as technology goes, so I haven't really been involved in considering other platforms so.

I know they looked at Cisco a little bit but I haven't myself.

• The ability to add a lot of processing capacity and memory into a small form factor.
• Consuming less rack space and being able to quickly change components in and out as things break without disruption of the network.

We were growing beyond our data center rack spaces with our 1U2U rack mount servers. We had a lot of them. We had a lot of HP DL360 and 380 servers and we were burning rack after rack after rack. When we consolidated to blades we were able to reduce our footprint in the data center.

They probably already have a lot of the features introduced, I just don't know about them yet. I'm looking forward to using the Security Central console, which I know you do have to manage. It's a console to manage Aruba stuff, all your switches, ProCurve lines, blades, and chassis, all in one single pane of glass. I'll be able to look at all those components and how they're all working in and amongst each other.

I've used it for seven or eight years.

It has been very stable.

We use about half of each chassis that we have in place and we have redundant chassis just in case a chassis should go down. It has never happened but from a scalability stand-point we continue to increase the amount of blades we use in each of those racks, each of those chassis.

I actually haven't had to call them a lot. A lot of the information and issues that I have I've found solutions to online. It seems to be when I have called them and it wasn't about the chassis and the pro-curbs, or the switch line it seemed like they had information. The only downside was when I was looking to do an IOS upgrade, or a firmware upgrade, on the switch the way we had it set up was in a virtual stack and they were supposed to upgrade individually and the tech guy at this time gave me bad information and said they were only supposed to reboot one at a time as each switch upgraded. They all rebooted at the same time and caused an outage, which was unfortunate.

The price is acceptable.

I'd recommend it. But weigh the pros and cons of the points of failure. Because there are single points of failure unless you have two chassis in place. Also the power and the cooling consumption. Blades in the chassis seem to consume a lot of energy. We use co-location facilities so we don't have to think a lot about how much power and energy we are consuming because we don't owe the data center. It's just a fixed price for the rack. But if you own your own data center and you have to pay for the power and the cooling, blades and the chassis if you have them filled and racked and stacked, they can consume a lot of energy.

One of the useful features is the Virtual Connect module as this approach allows me to utilize fewer physical ports to reach the total number of segregated ports that I need, especially for a virtual environment. Also, there is a server profile attached which is similar, but not yet full blown, to stateless computing.

This particular product allows us to mix up the environment - not only x86 but also the HP UX where the critical application were deployed. This particular architecture (BladeSystem) also allows us to have higher density which cannot be reached by traditional rack-mount servers. Currently, the latest trend (hyper converged approach) is still under observation.

The management is great but there are other competitors that are implementing a better approach. Even HP's own latest products have this composable approach, so if there are any changes that I would like to see, they are within this particular area.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance. There are several versions that have issues with the hardware that we need to replace and update firmware to fully utilize the blade.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7.5-8/10 because currently our company has a partnership that allows us to provide services and tech support. We get a great response from the HP team, and our local teams are also ready to help.

We chose this product because of the stability and their market share is quite large. This means that older products come from the same principals that makes it easier to integrate, and the second one is that this particular item is good to implement.

It is quite straightforward, as there is a wizard. I think newbies with simple documentation can perform the initial setup.

If the project is a complex one that includes any other items (storage, network, etc.) I would strongly recommended to hire a vendor team as it is their job to not only initialize the BladeSystem, but also to integrate it with the entire solution.

We also use Cisco UCS and IBM Flex servers.

Keep observing the market as new technologies have emerged, but not all are useful yet. It is good if we have a good relationship with the solution integrator as they may also give feedback.

I can remotely manage and monitor it easily.

The mail exchange server runs smoothly on the Blade Server.

With the management software, sometimes we can't run a new Java version or Active X. We have to use an old OS such as Windows XP to get through this. Some features of the Blade still requires you to use a CLI to configure.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment. I can use a laptop and configure the Blade from my office room so I don’t have to go to the server room.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good.

It was straightforward.

It was implemented through a vendor.

It's expensive and the price should be reduced.

We also use Cisco UCS and IBM Flex servers.

You should get it through a vendor.

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.

As it's modular (a small server) and has redundant hardware such as power, a SAN switch, and an interconnector, we do not need to worry when there is a failure.

Alongside HP 3PAR and VMware hypervisor, it is easy to manage the server.

It needs to have backward compatibile firmware. Also, the enclosure for Generation 9 canot be paired with Generation 1 or 6 so it takes more effort to perform the migration.

We have used this product since Generation 1 in 2009. Currently, we have Generation 1, Generation 6, and Generation 7. We are currently using a Generation 9 for a refresh and to replace our Generation 1 and 6 (still in progress).

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's fast and they respond well.

We chose it because we are already familiar with HP products.

The setup went smoothly.

A team from HPE assisted me.

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.