HPE BladeSystem Reviews

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.

I think the most valuable feature for us is probably the ability to expand and change, such as adding servers. If anything goes down, they can be changed out quite easily, which to me is a very, very good thing. It's easy to install, maintain, and expand.

We work with the NHS and we had a big system disaster one time when a system threatened to go down. With the BladeSystem, we were able to move everything quickly from one blade to another. It was fantastic and we averted a crisis.

I'm relatively new to my role, so I've seen the BladeSystem up to a point. I've not seen anything in it that we don't already have.

However, the installation probably could have gone even quicker except that we realized we didn't have enough RAM with just 512Mb. In this regard, the installation and setup wasn't as straightforward as it could have been because of the database appliance involved.

Deployment has been no problem.

Stability has been very good, probably 98% uptime, I think.

We have about 70 users per site and we have 700 sites. It's scaled nicely for us.

I don't have an awful lot to compare it to. I've worked with some other systems such as the Oracle DB appliance in another role elsewhere.

The initial setup took about an hour-and-a-half from start to finish, including taking it out of the box. But we did an awful lot of pre-implementation work that wasn't necessarily perfect, though at the end, we had a usable system in under two hours.

Make sure your network is set up correctly -- DNS, all the manual steps, etc. We had to rebuild a system because the DNS was wrong. Check all your cabling and other aspects of your installation process.

• Centralized management
• Number of features
• Flexibility

High consolidation and density was achieved with a single C7000 enclosure and 8 BL460c G8 series servers that took over the workload of 8x .42U cabinets previously used for processing workloads. In combination with Flex-10 and Flex-Fabric technology we managed to reduce our 8x cabinets into just 1x 42U cabinet saving huge amounts on power, energy, while we became more flexible, scalable and efficient.

Number of supported VLANs on virtual connect technology limits the number of VLANs you can deploy in your network.

I've used it for six years.

No issues encountered.

Absolutely no problem. Only some HDD failures which were replaced in under 4 hours due to our Care Pack program signed with HP.

No issues encountered.

Excellent, provided you end up having your support issue handled by a good HP services provider partner.

Very easy to setup and maintain, one to two days of training is sufficient for an expert to understand the philosophy. In case the level of the user is medium to low, some extra training might be required which is more to cover the basics of networking, consolidation and interfacing in an efficient way various systems together.

We have two in-house engineers trained on HP solutions that perform the implementation and maintenance. Our experience shows that the implementation is really straightforward provided you have a plan in place already.

The ROI was within 2 years, as the electricity bill was about 60-70% more efficient while our computational and storage capacity increased by at least 400%.

Yes, IBM Blade Center with HS22 blades and DS series storage. We preferred HP due to a combination of facts involving better prices, better support and better interoperability with other systems.

Be careful with pre-Sales and Sales team of HP, they do make mistakes so do not hesitate to engage a third party experienced person or firm to get some extra advice.

We now have consolidated solution that can be managed from a single point. Converged infrastructure in one box.

There are a couple of features that are valuable. The first is the On-Board Administrator (OA), which offers the best consolidated solution where you can manage/monitor the blade systems, modules, and the chassis from a single point and is redundant when installing two OA modules. The other one is being a converged infrastructure in one box when having a Virtual Connect (VC) modules installed whether it is Ethernet or fibre offering more redundancy, better hardware utilization and more organization.

The solution was used for the deployment of a High Availability, Hyper-V cluster of 10 Nodes, it dramatically improved the organization services in terms of performance "having things done faster", availability "services are online 99.99% of the time" ,and scalability "add new and provide more services". Currently the system is able to handle all our organizational requirements, from running Oracle CRM system, a BI system, an ERP system, web-services , and a development/staging platform. The cross functionality and integration between the plat forms are more efficient, fast and almost no down time due to the internal communications backbone in the chassis.

The HP BladeSystem has been proven to be the best in the market in terms of blade systems, moving with every generation and you can see that when firmware updates are released. Any lags/issues are always resolved and more features are added and enhanced.

The only missing piece that would be great to add to this converged solution is an integrated KVM system that comes inside the blade enclosure, that will give flexible and easy access to the different nodes in less time.

On the deployment aspect and especially when installing any OS through the On-board Administrator USB port, the installation is slow. I hope they can upgrade the port to USB 3.0 for faster access.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

HP Technical Support is very good whenever a case is opened. The spare parts, when dispatched are received with no hassle and on time.

We were using HP DL 380 G4/5/6 then we decided to moved towards blade systems because it needs less space, while providing more. Also, it's easier to manage, as it's consolidated solution in one box.

The initial setup of a blade system is very straightforward. In less than five minutes from the time you power up the system, you will have it ready to be managed and the OS deployed.

We did an in-house implementation, and my advice is to be very familiar with the HP BladeSystem, and what it can offer as a converged infrastructure solution in order to have a successful implementation to meet your ends need.

The ROI is around 25%-30% and it will be higher considering the cost on the long term.

It would be very smart to know how your are sizing your solution, and what you need to reduce the cost in terms of licensing. In some deployments, it can be done without the need for extra licenses. And as well in terms of the blade units, no need to over size and pay more initially since they can be easily swapped, scaled, or upgraded in the future.

Go for it you will not regret it, and you will be moving to a better consolidated and converged infrastructure that is easy to manage and highly scalable.

For HP Blades, there are many products to choose from, so it is important to tailor your solution to fit your needs and goal in order to achieve an easy implementation and result.

Among the most important features, is the possibility to manage all the systems from a single web UI, the ease of working with networks through the Virtual Connect devices, and finally the huge information offered in relation to the monitoring of the different elements and alarm systems

The scalability of these solutions and its great adaptation to existing software models has allowed our cloud environment to grow easily. The physical volumes with data combined with its performance, has enabled us to reduce our pool of conventional equipment, and converge High Availability solutions in our cloud environment with powerful hardware.

We expected more processing power, with more CPU cores and a greater number of cores per CPU.

Our company currently uses hardware solutions from different manufacturers. In relation to the HP Proliant products used for our cloud environment, these are primarily equipment BL and ML generations G4, G5, G6, G7 and G8. Our cloud environments also feature HP 3PAR storage solutions. The HP Proliant solutions have been used in our cloud environment for over five years. It was the best option available on the market, and we believe that it now enjoys the best reputation for such solutions.

The only problems encountered in the implementation of these products is that there are always more updated versions of the firmware supplied with the products, which requires revision and updating equipment before putting into production. Some versions of HP Blade require additional drivers for installation or special software distributions designed for these products.

Our satisfaction with the Customer Service is high, both the attention and availability as the solutions offered have always met our expectations.

The service availability of technical support gives us great peace of mind because their response times are minimal.

We actually had different solutions, and still do. Solutions such as Cisco UCS, which has a very similar philosophy, beaome more complex and less effective. Solutions from manufacturers such as Supermicro, and Dell do not reach the expectations, and require more supervision and maintenance by our technicians.

The installation was easy. It's usually quite intuitive since their operations team, and our team both have extensive experience in this type of facility, so that did not involve a special effort.

I can not evaluate the return on investment, as I don't work in accounts, but I understand that if we continue to invest in these solutions, we will get good economic results.

• Scalability
• Performance
• Out-of-band management
• Support

Java version dependence for its out-of-band management. This is also an issue for other vendors, as well.

HP Proliant Servers have been used on this project for over six years. I’ve managed them since I came on the project, so for almost five years. We used the BladeSystem alongside the DL servers.

There won't be any issues as long as you have followed the guidelines to ensure that the firmware was up to date prior to deployment.

There was an issue before I came on the project, where a firmware update was not applied and had caused a few systems to become unstable under certain conditions, but HP support was able to identify the cause and provide a solution.

The systems scale well for our environment.

Mostly very positive. The only issue I’ve encountered has been with pre-sales support (i.e. getting accurate quotes to purchase systems).

It's excellent.

Before coming on this project I had used Dell servers. The performance of the HP server has an edge over the Dell systems I had used.

HP Proliant servers are rock solid and when you need technical support HP’s team is there to support you with answers, no matter how long it takes to properly identify the root cause and then propose a solution.

• Ease of use in terms of setup
• No need for configuration
• High Availability
• Profile copying
• Auto-tiering
• One system can go down and the other is still fully functional, so you have redundancy
• Removes a lot of administrative hassle

It’s reduced, by about 50%, our administration time in terms of server maintenance. We have the ability to withstand an outage that we didn’t have before.

I would like to see, now that HP has acquired Aruba, all my HP devices connected.

I’ve used it for almost two years, we deployed our first system in Feb. 2014 and second in July 2014.

No issues encountered.

We have been extremely stable. That is the reason we placed these servers in our environment. We decided to go with HP because of cost, stability and ease of use, and we have been able to hire over a hundred people a year due to the stability within the organization.

No issues with scalability.

10/10.

10/10.

We were using IBM and they were horrible.

It was very straightforward, seamless and very easy. My team did not have a lot of experience, and within a day they were experts. They were able to figure out the system and deploy.

We did it in-house.

I would say it’s a considerable amount of dollars, we lose about $160,000 a day when we're down, and with the amount of time of downtime we’ve had being so little, we’ve saved a good deal of money.

It wasn’t expensive, and the purchase of the equipment was not bad at all. The total investment was under half a million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what we’ve gained.

We looked at a ton of other options, some within HP, and some from Cisco. The HP Blades made the most sense for what we were getting.

Understand your environment, and make sure it’s the right fit for you. You know the uptime you need, the type of compute you need, and a formal understanding of 'do we have what we need in the data center to push this.' This may not be the right solution for everyone, but know your business and whether this solution is applicable to you.

It provided integrated storage, networking, servers, and management.

It is a single integrated solution that can be deployed anywhere. Best solution for our mobile tracking station.

Nothing that I can think of. We can always upgrade.

I've used it for three years.

It's easy to deploy and the HP command-line interface is, in my personal opinion, similar to Cisco.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I haven't had to deal with HP yet.

I haven't had to deal with HP yet.

We are also using Dell servers. It is not a switch, and we switched because this is more fit for our purposes.

It was not easy as we had to get vendor for deployment because of lack of internal skills and time constraints.

Through a vendor and they are well experienced.

It's high.

I believe it's worth the price you pay.

We also evaluated options from Dell.

Get experienced vendors for deployment and you won't have issues later, that is, if you don't have the skills In-house.