HPE BladeSystem Reviews

• 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.

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.