HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

Our primary use case is focused on harmonizing databases. The method of deployment depends on our clients and their needs.

The size can be improved by making it a little slick. Additionally, we are at a disadvantage in support for people in African countries using the product because we don't have access to the support team 24/7. The solution has several support levels, such as essential and proactive support. They can extend support to African countries.

We have been using the solution for five years and are currently using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is highly scalable because the processor core is high to the extent of a dual processor. This means it can handle a heavy workload and virtualization. It's one of the best products that can be effective in a virtualized environment.

I rate the customer service and support an eight out of ten.

The initial setup took a few hours.

Implementation was in-house and required at least two or more people, depending on their level of expertise.

The pricing of the solution is high compared to other products.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but the processing power can be improved. I recommend the solution to people who are considering implementing it.

The most common use cases for HPE ProLiant DL Servers are application servers, web servers, and screen servers.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are customizable, but when you first deploy them, you basically have to rebuild configurations on them. This is true for large orders. But for small orders, you will be tied up with previous configurations of some other brand like Dell.

I have been selling HPE ProLiant DL Servers for 11 years. I configure HP ProLiant and SimpliVity products every day for the purpose of selling. I am not an engineer. I am a sales executive. 

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is stable. 

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is scalable. 

We are quite satisfied with the technical support. We have a direct contact with our HP support. They are always very useful.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is easy to deploy. 

Flexibility, scalability, and being a standard. I've used during my career. It's useful to know exactly where to go for information and where to go for support. It just works.

Just that support is really easy to get a hold of and when things are not functioning, they are able to get the right parts within the right SLAs and it just happens.

I would like to see an on-demand model. I think they are already going there. I would like to see something in which you can move your workloads to a cloud kind of offering. That would be something that would be ideal in the future.

From a pricing perspective, a consumption based model would be optimal. There are times when a complete purchase isn’t required and a short term burst of compute is needed.

The stability is really good.

The level of scalability depending on the product you choose. With the DL specifically, you can have as many hosts as you want or as much storage as you want. It is very modular. You can just keep bolting things on, essentially like LEGO.

I have used technical support, but not recently. In the past, they were really good when I used them.

I've only been with the organization a short time. The decision to go with this product was made before I started. The vendor, who did our infrastructure as a service offering, is an HPE partner. So we didn't really choose the solution, but rather, it came to us. And I wouldn't have chosen anything else anyway.

When selecting a vendor, I look for flexibility and support. Everyone has a good sales pitch. However, when it comes to actually executing on it and supporting it long-term, those are the really important parts that not a lot of people consider up front.

I was not involved in the setup at this organization.

Just make sure you look at the total cost of ownership and the long-term use case of what you're actually doing, versus the problem that you're trying to solve right now.

It's pretty quick. It's much easier to maintain than other servers we had before. We believe that the 380s are more stable than the other HPE servers that we had before.

It benefits our organization, operation-wise, because of its stability. Operation-wise, we don't have to put out as much and there's less maintenance.

I would like more advice about drivers and servers, depending on the application we are using.

Stability is probably the most important feature, especially if you are running a production service. The stability of the solution is really good.

Scalability is pretty good. It depends on the model. The 380 only has a couple of slots you can use. You can put some other enclosures in there as well.

We didn’t use other solutions before. We pretty much use servers from generation 3 and now we are up to generation 8.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward. It gives you all the options that you want.

We select a vendor based on their statistics. We check if they work with other companies or other industries similar to ours. We see if they work with applications that we use, as well as the price. 

Right now, we have HPE from the service perspective. We do have HPE on our shortlist. We currently have IBM as well. 

We are looking into other service management companies. We have HPE at the moment, but we are looking at other service management options.

Depending on the applications they use, they should study the technical requirements, such as storage and processing power.

This kind of product is mainly a cost product. You need to have a good price. It is not a question of big features because there are no main differences between products.

I think the main feature is that it works. We have good management for the product, HPE OneView, which might be a good feature of the product, where you can manage it. Instead of the hardware technology, that is it.

What we are doing with the product is, we are building services on top of the HPE products, so the main advantage for us is that we have a stable, reliable platform.

I would like to see better license management with the iLO. It is very difficult to manage the licenses for the hardware, as they can easily be lost. Then it is very hard to get it back. That must be better.

We have not experienced any stability problems; 100% stable.

It is a physical thing, so the main scalability issues are money and delivery time, and not the technology itself. It is difficult to evaluate scalability for a simple server. Scalability is determined by the software and we are not talking about Superdome, just a low-level ProLiant server.

If we scale, we buy more machines. No issues so far.

The standard technical support is fine. We also have support with Proactive Support and contact and sometimes you need it, especially for SAP HANA systems where it was average.

The HP ProLiant support was OK.

We have been buying HPE rack servers for years. We are talking every year about switching to another technology, and it depends on the performance and the price at that moment, for one year normally.

When we are looking at a vendor like HPE, the most important criteria are innovation, reliability, and good support.

We also considered Dell rack servers, Lenovo, and Fujitsu. In the end, we chose HPE because of price.

Have a deep look at the HPE products. They are a market leader, by the numbers. Have a look at them; make a thorough comparison.

The flexibility of using storage options would be one valuable feature. Another would be competitive pricing. And yet another would the quite high top speeds on the processor.

It's also the simplicity and user friendliness that's important to us. The only issues we've had were software related from our own side, but not from HP.

The provisioning is something you want to do regardless of the actual types of hardware that you use as you want it as wide as possible.

We use the DL380 mainly for our workloads, so it's a combination of having to use local storage but also having high demands in terms of top speed on processors. We're using the highest top speed possible in a DL380. With that on the local discs, we get lots of performance where other systems will connect to a traditional SAN-based storage.

You would lose speed there, so we use the product for these high workloads, but we also use products like the 380 or the 360 for workloads that are actually offsite. These are like our smaller data centers where we don't have virtualization. These are branch offices or could be used as a domain controller for Windows, those sorts of workloads.

We'd like to have a management platform that's not limited and that would give us a single view of all our systems. This full range of options is limited only to certain types of hardware.

Also, if you look at compatible infrastructure that was introduced recently, it will be like an image streamer in a compatible system. An image streamer won't be able to provision older types of servers.

It's my job to design the infrastructure of the RAM. If there's any operational issue, I would be the one calling HP for that.

We've looked at a lot of IBM systems as well as Lenovo and Dell. We also looked at converged systems like Nutanix.

Look for performance specs. There's a lot of high-end servers being sold in the market with quite low specs.

• It helps with work-load management
• It's a reliable solution
• It's easy to fix
• It's easy to work with and manage

I have never implemented them as part of an organization, but I worked with these rack servers while providing support for customers.

During the period of time I was providing tech support for this product line, I was able to see that its fault tolerance is really high, providing the capability of a reaction against a “disaster” and the failure rate is really low.

Obviously, you will still have hardware failures, but it is not something you can easily fix. This is more about the regular hardware failures that you may get on daily basis such as a bad HDD, NIC failure or regular hardware failures that may be present due to the normal workload of the server, meaning that they have or exceeded the lifetime or they are presenting a huge workload.

Regarding the normal functionality of the server as is, the only improvement I would say is to continue with the research and the development of higher workload capacities as the customer needs are constantly growing, therefore the demand for what the product requires to do will also grow, to avoid the demand to elapse behind the improving of the technology needs to be continued. It's tied to the needs of the end users and any new features that they would require in order to better manage their organizations.

I’ve worked with these products for over three years providing technical support for the HP ISS industry customers. I did not need to use them in a production environment.

I was part of the technical support team.

I used to guide customers with the installation, and the initial setup was always straightforward.

It's just a solid server. You put it up and it just kind of runs. It's not a whole bunch of jumping through hoops or anything to configure it. It's pretty straightforward. It's really all you can say about the ProLiant servers.

It gave me more insight to our actual data usage on our disk arrays. Before that, we were using the P2000 G3 disk array from HPE MSA series; just not a whole lot of insights in that.

Providing areas with room for improvement is a tough one. We're running AMD right now, so we're not running the latest gen. We're running a gen 8, something DL series. I honestly can't provide areas with room for improvement until I see the next version of what that's going to be. I mean, it’d be nice if AMD got off their butts and provided a new chip for us to use, but right now it's all Intel.

I wish there was a clearer-cut way to back up the BIOS and restore other machines. That'd be really the biggest thing I could see an improvement on, which I think they did fix in gen 9 and 10.

I rack them and throw them in there. Once you put them on a rack, as long as you don't mess with it, they just run.

With the DL series redundancy line, just keep throwing them in the rack and plug it into your cluster and it goes. You're not stuck on a blade mid-planner waiting for all your blades to go out of the mid-plane on the enclosure with half of the access; that's why we moved to the DL series. They give us that reliability and we can do redundancy with it; unlike the blade enclosures, where you have to purchase two separate blade enclosures to get genuine redundancy, which is a very steep purchase.

The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. I find it amazing that I paid for extra for support for the 3PAR and I wait on the phone for 30 minutes. For that extra support, when I'm paying for the premium support; so it's US-side support, US-based support, I should mention. If I call the regular number without the extra support, I talk to someone instantly.

It's, "What care plan are you on? What care plan are you on?" That's the question of HPE, "Are you on the SA plan?" "Are you on this plan?" You got to dig through this matrix of plans to figure out which phone are we going to call. It's absurd.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do all of the implementation myself.