HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The ability to configure it in a highly reliable fashion.

We don’t have to worry about manufacturing it ourselves. We can take advantage of HP’s scale to achieve much shorter delivery cycles.

We’re just introducing it in the middle of this year, so in my labs I’ve got about 200 blades in many different chassis.

We’ve placed another order for a 20-blade system, and I expect by next year we’ll have hundreds of blades.

I would like to see them support G10 blades on the C7000.

It’s been very stable for us. We’re using KVM on top of the hardware, and it’s been very good and has done everything we need it to do thus far.

It’s scalable enough for our purposes.

We can put 2 chassis together in a rack, 16 blades per chassis. With this scalability, we can see that it provides all the capacity we envision needing for the foreseeable future. We’re also evolving our software to take further advantage of this platform's scalability (part of 4G LTE systems).

There are different kinds of technical support. The kinds of things we need in R&D are answers to fairly arcane questions regarding the product, and support has been so-so. It takes a long time to find the right guy.

We were using expensive, in-house-developed hardware. From an R&D perspective, there was not enough critical mass to keep the investment going. In addition to the expense, order to delivery was six months for our in-house solution. In contrast, HP can turn around in two weeks, which is a huge advantage for us.

Setup was fine. The installers didn’t complain.

It was a decision between the internally-developed product or HP. There was a synergy with other products already using HP, so we went with HP.

You need to look for high reliability, duplex power servers, and networking. If you’re looking for carrier grade reliability, the C7000 is an excellent choice.

HP’s blades are by far the most configurable of all the ones we’ve tried. We're a company that deploys less than 60 blades a year in the data center, so it wouldn’t make sense to have a stand up UCS because we’re only standing up half a chassis of blades every year.

HP’s chassis is modular, so it’s economical. The architecture and model make sense for us -- and for other small-medium sized companies like us -- to stay with HP.

It would be good to see the driver support improved as this has been the weakest feature of the system. Despite this, we are still 2 points better than anyone else in the market.

Also, the learning curve for configuring the first UCS blade is very steep. The difference is that with HP, if you understand the principles of how to get the blade to talk to the outside way, it’s difficult to not get it to work just by poking around the HP switch.

I’m glad HP doesn’t do configuration wizards, because they make a lot of assumptions of what you’re trying to do today (only works if they know what your model is). Keep the cookbooks going, because they work a lot better.

One word of advice for UI: don’t let the web devs decide what features you need.

If I were a generic IT support guy and had a complaint with deployment, it would be that it’s hard to get to the bench and pull somebody off it who can timely fix a detailed technical problem.

Stability, overall, is very good, and it’s kind of like an old jazz song -- when it’s good, it’s very good; but when it’s bad, it’s terrible.

For small/medium sized businesses, the C-series blade chassis are great for the reasons I’ve said (they come in the right-sized bites).

If you’re a small business, you don’t want a blade chassis; but if you’re enormous, then you’re buying them by the rack (so perhaps UCS makes sense).

But for us, we needed the right-sized chassis, for which HP is the right fit. We’re going to go heavier into it, and I’m leaning toward us standing up the next production database in blades.

Once, we had a machine fall over, and we were quickly escalated up to the appropriate level of support. The bad news is that they didn’t tackle the problem quickly. We couldn’t afford to have servers down, and HP didn’t deal with it quickly. They first said to upload the logs, which we did. We were told to deploy an updated package of software – which we did not want to do since we wanted to stick with a stable release that was working for us.

It was a bit of a struggle to get Level 3 support to pay attention to our problem. The field technician was eventually the one who fixed it.

However, it’s good that HP still has a dual support platform (one for IT professionals and one for non-IT), unlike Dell, where it sometimes feels like you are wasting time talking to support teams that don’t understand your technical experience.

We use both BladeSystem and RackMail System a lot. By utilizing the computing capacity of both systems, we have more cores of HP’s BladeSystem than anything else. Our company’s growing so fast that we’re age-ing stuff out and replacing it very quickly.

I am not interested in new and shiny; I need usability right now. We switch whenever we do a hardware replace, and we tend to prefer HP’s computer platforms as they’ve proven to us that it's best not to mix and match in the computer space.

So far, we've bought only small devices, so it's not painful to change storage devices. Because of how we grow (acquisition and internally), we own mostly Dell the vast majority of the time, and as those systems go out, we replace them with HP hardware.

Pretty straightforward. The tech talk documentation is very good (cookbook). They have standard scenario templates for blade chassis and they walk you through the whole configuration for whatever your needs are. They’re not brand-centric, so we can use whatever switch we’ve got, we can configure all the ports very easily, and it's straightforward to do so.

HP’s tech talks are significantly better than the market, especially Dell’s, and it’s easy for me to compute my blade chassis without too much headache.

We casually looked at Cisco UCS (we’ve currently got a running installation, both fairly young machines right now), which completely loses to HP on ease-of-blade configurability. We’ve also got some Hitachi blades that are even worse.

The hardware is perfectly good hardware, unlike Cisco where I don’t like some of the design, and Hitachi’s blades just aren’t economical for our growth and configurability uses. You only have to configure the amount of blades that you need with HP.

We often do a rack-and-replace on hardware at a site we buy, and we need products that can keep up with our growth rate. We replace anything that's rendered obsolete when we grow, often replacing them with HP products.

The other thing that keeps us coming back to HP is the ease of support (ease that we have in supporting the server hardware and maintaining it). Ease of configurability and configuration for VMWare are very important.

We’re in the process of buying 14 new HP products.

Remember to take into account your business size when looking at the solution (see above). First, I would listen to peer reviews and figure out what your sizing needs are, because architecture decisions are not obvious.

I want to see VARs think more analytically regarding company needs. HP could differentiate itself more effectively by getting its VARs to think more like consultants.

HP is very aware of and adaptable to our market. They've been able to provide the best technology to fit our market.

HP is a good partner, as they really try to understand and build trust with our market.

Institutional memory-- we used it previously and stuck with it.

I want to see a standardized interface for managing blade chassis when they’re not virtual connect. Also, I'd like to see a return to the program in which you can purchase different skews for your chassis needs. That was a great program, which they should bring back. I'm disappointed that the current purchase program isn't quicker.

I use everything from G5 to G9 and ProLiant blades.

I’ve had some recent issues when doing hardware and simple memory upgrades. When I pull out and put back a blade, they system has a tendency to shut down random blades in the chassis. When working on our production system, this issue messes up our clustering and systems.

The scalability is great.

It’s been decent. When we’ve had our issues, they tell us how to resolve them. They always tell us to update the firmware, but in our production environment, it takes me many months to get that done.

We were previously affiliated with the government, and they were using HP.

I’d say that setup complexity depends on the type of system you get. We went for the blade chassis, and they were great. We recently dropped virtual connect and initially went with more traditional blades from Cisco, and they seemed to be fine. They were very clunky to set up, however, and I was disappointed. But setup for HP blades were fairly simplistic.

Dell, Cisco, ans briefly Hitachi. HP came out on top primarily for its knowledge in our organization. On the server front, everything is similar, and there was no real need to jump ship.

We looked at our what our guys already knew.

Single point of management is important. If you were to step back five years ago, HP was very strong in that, when Dell and Cisco weren’t quite as good. Now, they’re all pretty good, so central management of my blades is fairly important for me. I’m running hundreds of these servers, and it’s important for me to be able to manage them all centrally and quickly.

Their reliability and their integration. I’ve been working with HP solutions since the 90s, and they’re great.

They do what they’re supposed to do. They’re very flexible.

In the future, I'd like to see more manageability. They keep adding features which are nice, so I can’t think of anything else.

Relatively stable and reliable for the amount that we have. I’ve been working with HP hardware for decades, and as with all hardware there’s always problems, but for the years that I’ve been working with them they’re always been very reliable.

We haven’t really had to scale, but we can provision them usually from the get-go for what we do.

It’s okay. Working in support myself, their response times for us (we have a couple thousand servers) didn’t seem to be great. A lot of the time, there’s no concessions for response times not being met.

They’ve had servers forever, and we’ve always had HP. So we just continued using the existing solution.

They’re pretty straightforward. It’s all automated so that their tools are deployed for us.

We’ve been with HP forever, so I don’t think so.

I’m pretty opinionated, but first look at pricing and see which option is right for you. HP is a good bet, but it really depends. I can only speak about HP, but they’ve been very good.

iLO (Remote Management) is probably the best in the market, their RAID Cards (SmartArray) are also very good.

1. iLO even in its basic form can get you out of hot water as you can just do a remote power-cycle. iLO Advance can get you to remotely troubleshoot the OS even if its in a defunct state
2. RAID I have found useful as its quite easy to remotely expand the array
3. Upgrading of firmware is very easy as well, even in a VMWare vSphere (ESXi hypervisor)

I believe they are ahead of the other vendors (IBM, Dell and Cisco). Probably what they can improve on are minor things -

1. Registration of licenses, this includes iLO advanced and upgraded support. This requires you to log on with HP and activate the key that has been given to the server. Its just a convoluted process that I rather as a technical engineer not have to do.
2. Access to updated drivers and firmware. They now require you to logon and have the device serial number to get to drivers. Even new devices requires this. If the device is 3 years old OK, but new devices just frustrates the customer and slows down deployments.

Full time the last five years but I have been around them for eight years.

Generally no. We did have issues where a RAID card would not work with array build until we updated the firmware. Even after getting HP to replace the RAID card, the replacement card came with the same faulty firmware. This was for a bottom end server though. All the mid and high range servers have had no problems with deployments.

If there is ever a problem with stability, generally firmware has fixed this, We've had a range of issues, probably the most common issue has been SAS cards and tape drives staying up (both in Windows and ESXi environments). We did have an issue where during a power outage, the BIOS lost the boot sequence on a sever that was using an SD Card as its boot device, a firmware update fixed that. Teamed NICS having dropouts also required updates.

No, these servers when specified can host incredible amounts of VM's. The CPU options and RAM expansions are very good.

Excellent, they are happy to trust you in raising the issue and supply you with replacement hardware with minimal fuss. They are also helpful if you require technical assistance for configuration.

We used to use IBM. I wasn't part of the decision for the change but to be honest I'm glad we moved away from IBM. They had moved to LSI for RAID and their UEFI Bios meant every reboot took 10 minutes. Also their technical support was rapidly going downhill.

Straightforward, 90% of all installation you can just refer to the server cover for RAM sequence, CPU installations or RAID expansion.

We are a reseller.

Its hard to say but if you count the improvement of remote access (iLO) and ease of upgrading firmware means we don't have to organise serious downtimes when we had previously dealt with other vendors.

We previously used IBM Servers and we may revisit this if Lenovo fixes the issues with the IBM servers. We also haved used Cisco UCS servers where the deal suited. I still believe HP is still ahead of both Cisco and IBM.

* High Performance

* High Reliability

* "Insight Management" of the hardware

* Compatibility with all of the major Network Operating systems

It has provided us with a platform on which we have been able to create innovative solutions for our customers at very reasonable prices.

It would be nice if they were a little lighter in weight.

I have used Proliant series servers since they were first introduced.

On rare occasions, I have experienced hardware failures out of the box, but HP, and Compaq before that, were quick to resolve the problem and get the hardware up and running the next business day.

On very rare occasions, instability was experienced due to driver incompatibilities or firmware maladies. HP provided updates or workarounds to get the system stable fairly quickly.

I've never experienced an issue with hardware scalability.

Customer Service:

Customer service is outstanding.

Technical Support:

Over the years, technical support has gone from outstanding to "needs improvement", and back to "reasonably good". Typically, I've had to push the front line support team to escalate the issue to the back line, and the issue from there was quickly resolved. For hardware failures, it's been necessary from time to time to convince the front line that all of the diagnostic steps needed to isolate and identify the failed component have already been performed, and that what is needed is to get the replacement part. That process has also improved.

The initial setup has been straightforward in that HP has provided "Smart Start" kits to assist in getting their systems up and running very quickly. These kits typically prepare the systems for NOS installation and provide the necessary drivers to successfully discover all of the hardware components installed.

I am a Value Added Reseller, working with the end-user to acquire and build the solutions.

I have evaluated Dell and IBM products as part of an overall review of possible solutions for the customer.

If you need assistance in deploying Proliant servers, please feel free to contact me.

The HP ProLiant line has proven to be a very durable and reliable product. This is the greatest thing that I love about HP servers. They just work and keep on working. We have HP ProLiant servers which are almost 10 years old and is still working until today.We bought HP ProLiant servers as they offered us the best value for money in our part of the country. HP also has great support countrywide, and we didn't have any problem that the local support could not handle. This for me is the number reason why selected HP ProLiant for our servers in our part of the country. We felt more at ease with HP ProLiant rather than with IBM System X, as HP has better support.

The only con I can think off with using HP ProLiant is the limited parts of the old servers. This is understandable though, as it is also not feasible for vendors to stock parts which might never be sold.There is also this thing about server management. Other vendors like Cisco has really taken leaps and bounds in overhauling server manageability and make it work. HP has had new products as of late, but I think they must have innovated sooner as they are now behind the competition in this regard.

I would definitely recommend HP ProLiant servers. They are very reliable and very easy to configure. Just make sure that you stock-up on parts which you think might not be available any more in the foreseeable future. From experience, stock on the hard disks especially if you are still using the older technology, and buy redundant power supplies as these are the ones that normally fail after years of continuous operations.