HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The commonality between the systems is very valuable, and it is very easy to manage.

It helped us a lot because it's a very stable solution.

It's not changing very much in terms of handling from generation to generation. So every time they introduce a new ProLiant generation, it's very easy for our operations team to adopt it; and it's very easy for us to adapt to the new features.

Because of the commonality between systems, we also have a very lean and optimized process for replacing people when resources need to be moved around. I think that's the main benefit of the ProLiant platform.

My personal opinion is that the rack-mount kits in generation four were the best. The current ones are kind of overcomplicated to mount, so I would really like to go back to how the rack mount worked when we had the G4. This would really be an improvement.

It's rock solid. I have never seen a ProLiant server breaking down for no reason.

I think for us the scalability is definitely sufficient. We have the two-socket series and the four-socket series. We did not look beyond that because it's just not in our requirements; but we are fine with what we have.

They are very efficient, fast and friendly. They know their products. It was a good experience.

When I joined the company, we were on Compaq ProLiant and we stayed with it. For HP, the ProLiant series is still a strategic product. If you look at other vendors, say IBM, they even sold the X86 server business. So there are not too many vendors in the business who have a very strategic X86 server series, and HP is obviously one of them.

It's a data center. Things go in and out. I was a system administrator myself many years ago, so I set up a lot of HPE ProLiant systems. They were very easy to set up in the past. They have become even easier. I would say that half of the strength of the ProLiant servers is the software and the additional tools that HPE provides.

IBM fell off our short list of vendors because they just gave up the business.

Dell didn’t have the same level of stability, maintainability, and range of products that we have with the ProLiant series.

Investigate some use case scenarios relevant for your daily business perspective, for example:

• What do you need to do to change defective hardware in your system?
• What do you need to do to upgrade your systems?

Check the workflows:

• How easy is it to change the parts?
• How easy is it to access the server?

Do you have the right documentation already in the server, like it is for HPE; or do you need external sources to know what you are doing?

Stability is the most important feature. We use it for the infrastructure as a service. We need stable service.

I would like to see more standardized management. In the past, there was a lot of mixture between the software and the hardware features.

It is stable and has been for many years. We have used HPE for three or four years and we don't have a lot of complaints.

We buy the biggest one each time and we multiply it by two every year. We need a lot of them. We set them up in clusters close to us, so there are no scalability issues.

I have used technical support, but primarily with warranty questions. We have no issues with technical support at all.

I was involved in the installation. It was straightforward and not complex.

We looked at Dell, Lenovo, and IBM.

We do a mini competition a few times a year and we buy a lot of servers. This is needed in the Netherlands. We started to use HPE.

We are looking for basic functionality and see if the solution conforms with open standards.

When choosing a product, price is an issue. If two products have the same specifications, then we have to choose the one with the lowest price.

My advice is to decide if you want a cheap and bad server, or if you want a stable and good server.

Scalability and being able to customize the service in just the way that we really want it.

The benefits are that we can customize what we want. We're able to tailor the actual service itself to our specific requirements. This is opposed to trying to get something off-the shelf which doesn't quite fit and then we have to make compromises.

I’d like to see a lower price. That's not the whole 20% difference of why I gave it an 8. One of the negative things that we find is that the configuration tools are sometimes not easy to use. That contributes to the detriment of the score.

I would rank scalability at about 80%.

I have used support. There are certain proprietary information elements which are clearly owned by HPE which are always nice to look at when troubleshooting. There are some items that we understand that they can't share. From a technical point of view, it would be nice to have more visibility and scale.

I was involved in the setup. I think our first installation was okay. When we are buying new models, sometimes the support doesn't feel like it's quite there. That might not necessarily be on the HPE side of things. This lack of support might be from some of the products that we use with it.

We go through software purchasing cycles and we know roughly when, in the lifetime, we need to purchase certain key infrastructure components. We also have the ad hoc requests where we need to get a certain per-line, server-specific, full requirements, and then we buy as we need it.

When selecting a vendor, trust is the main issue. I'd suggest others seriously consider HPE as a service solution. Our experience has been pretty positive. Based upon that I, would recommend HPE products.

What is good about HPE servers is that you have a consistent way and how to manage them across all the lines. You don't have to learn something for one type of server and then have to learn something else for a different type of server. If you have different types of servers, you can always build on the knowledge you have and you have a unified way to approach things in configuration, in setting up, maintaining, and so on and so forth.

The organization is always hamstrung by the staff people they have available to run these systems. If you have a trained staff, you don't want to throw all this training overboard just to get a new server. You have an evolving but steadily moving ecosystem of how you get these things set up, connected, maintained and so on, so forth. That's probably even more valuable than just, "Hey, competitor A or B has 2% more efficiency or 2% more power to deliver".

It's always the next generation of hardware, of course: Who does the better job? You also can look at things and say, "Hey, we were going all blades. We were going with virtual connect.”, and do specific things in that way. We learned certain lessons doing that, of course.

For the next generation, we probably won't have that many blades. We will probably revert to rack-mounted servers, but have bigger servers instead of the smaller servers. That also evolves with the workloads you have. Over the period of time we typically run these systems, such as five years, there's a lot of change in what the users request from us. Of course, there are new developments. For example, before we started VDI, we said, “OK, if we want to do VDI going forward, we probably want to incorporate some GPU into that.” That would probably lead to new architecture and then we want to do other stuff like high-performance computing, as well, on that. The next generation probably would look completely different from what we have now.

We have been using HPE servers for a very long time. The current implementation was done in 2013 and 2014, but we have been using HPE servers for 20 years or more. It was not necessarily called HPE at that time but one of the companies they acquired over the decades.

Stability is a non-issue. As long as you don't touch anything, nothing will really happen. If you update everything here and there, you have to really pay attention. We have a complex setup with storage and servers and networking, storage networking and so on and so forth. Once you change one component, all the others might blow up in your face if you don't do it correctly. Especially in the storage space, we rely heavily on HPE to mix and match, make sure that the matrix is correct to do all of the maintenance on that level.

Scaling is fairly easy. With the blades, I think the only barrier here is, once you fill up the enclosure, you need a new enclosure. That's the primary barrier. As long as you can grow inside the enclosure, that's a non-issue. Otherwise, you have a steeper investment, but then again, it scales up from a single server to the full enclosure, to the full rack.

We never had to go that way, though. Everything we did always fit into one enclosure in one rack. We had two of them, spread across sites. Even in a situation where one of our data centers fails, we can still have all of the workload running out of the other data center. By the means of the software stack we have around it, that works without a mishap. You don't really even notice it with the storage and the virtualization layer. That all happens in the blink of an eye, automatically, which is very important for us. It’s also reproducible, of course. And, you can do it backwards, unlike some solutions, where you can failover but if you want to failback, you would need a myriad of highly skilled IT professionals to do that move back with data synchronization, but this solution really does it all.

Support on the hardware side is a little bit more challenging than on other sides because there are so many components involved, if you look at servers. There are many vendors who provide components to HPE. You have to mix and match everything. You really need a professional support organization with that to help you. If you do the wrong thing, do the wrong update, that might hamstring you with the whole operation because you don't get anywhere, anymore.

The setup is quite straightforward. It's really a bunch of servers but, of course, that involves getting all of the components together, having everything configured to order and then having it configured to the software stack. We incorporated HPE partners to do that for us and then we took over and said, "Okay, from now on, we involve this system until its end of lifetime." We went from the one version of the hypervisor to the current version of the hypervisor, and we're going to the next, and the next, and the next. Setting up is the first step but from that point on, you can take it yourself and drive it yourself.

For the blade offerings, most of the competitors have similar capabilities. However, they probably have evolved them only within the last five years, whereas I would say HPE has a much longer runway into that. They have a much more established, esteemed platform there. The C class of BladeSystems is something that's there for years now. I think we have the second procurement of those. At the end of its lifetime, we're running it for 10 years, whereas others have changed their blade strategies two or three times. I think that's the worst thing you can do, if you have to change it on there.

The C7000 and C3000 have been around for 10 years, maybe 15 years, already. Everything that came afterwards, such as Synergy or the Superdome X, they all build on top of that. The C9000 and whatever they call the Synergy enclosure, it really takes the best from the established path and then just adds the latest technology to that.

If you have that knowledge and ability, and you can leverage that, you have a big advantage over all the others who come to the market with a new solution and try to find customers.

For the server technology, most of the features you can nowadays find with most of the vendors, so they're probably at the stage where HPE was five years ago. The ecosystem is so mature and still evolving. There's nothing like, "Hey we have this feature, we don't change it." The management, the procurement, the provisioning, all of that is really kicking off going forward. Probably with the next generation, I’d gave it a higher rating.

Reliability and supportability are the most valuable features. We can upgrade our drivers and other software and smoothly to roll it out to the enterprise.

From my point of view, most of what we do with our servers is fairly common. So we could get the same solution elsewhere. It's about the manageability and the way that we are able to do it in the scope of the resources we have.

The ProLiant does what it needs to do. It's not entirely perfect. It could run at lower power, for instance, and it could run cooler. I guess all of that comes at a price.

These servers are very stable.

It scales in a kind of linear fashion so it's not amazing. We expected it to scale, and it does. But it's not like it scales very high. Each server is managed individually anyway so it's, maybe, not a fair question about ProLiant.

I think technical support is fair to good. Not outstanding, but fair to good. Although, having said that, we don't very often call them. So that is a good thing itself.

We've always had HPE servers, but as a proportion of our environment we have fewer HPE ProLiant servers now. We have fewer HPE hub servers than we did previously, because we're now a dual vendor. We started that about five years ago, but it's a double-edged sword. Now, we are in two environments and we have another vendor to manage. You drive down price, but it's two lots to manage. Learning how to handle this internally is quite difficult as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That's done by our engineering team.

We've got two vendors that have comparable products. We have essentially the same as the ProLiant with our alternative vendor. They have the same processor, the same type of memory, and the same memory speed. In terms of performance, we wouldn't really see that there's much difference between the two. The main differentiator is the manageability and getting it to and onto the floor.

My main advice is to standardize your internal offering. So, if you are buying something you're going to sell internally, which is effectively what I am doing, I'm selling a service, try to standardize it to a degree rather than having custom fixes for every internal customer. Then you've got some uniformity across your offering internally.

When choosing a vendor, there are two main requirements. One is for a solid, stable product. That's number one. The second thing is the ability to be able to make the deal. With our vendors, we have kind of a mixed bag. One of them doesn't really deliver on the stability and the manageability, but is excellent on service and cutting a deal. The other one is not too good at cutting the deal, but actually we know that that's the kit we want because it is very stable and very manageable.

The reliability of the hardware is a valuable feature. The way it looks is valuable as well, because when we have to set it up at a worker's terminal space, we can just see a nice face on the server and that’s important. It's easy to set up and you can get parts very easily.

The benefit is that it goes well with our customers. Customers are happy with that. We sell them, and that's how we make money.

I would like to see better support of monitoring protocols.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any crashes in over two years of deployment, so that's good.

Scalability is really only an issue for software. ProLiant is only hardware, so scalability doesn't matter at all.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward. I can just plug in a server.

We were considering Dell and some other vendors.

When selecting a vendor, the ratio between the price and quality is the main thing. I don't want to be spending too much, but I still want to get good quality. It just depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for a very inexpensive, bare bones server, then you should go for a cheaper solution. If you are looking to buy a bunch of servers, then go to Dell, for example, because they're very aggressive with their prices. HPE is just in between. It's very good. It is a bit more expensive than the others, but the quality is where you expect it to be.

The most valuable feature is reliability. We virtually have no problems with it. We run most of our applications on ProLiant DLs. We also run Exchange, and proprietary applications such as Attorney Information Manager and an accounting package called ProVantage.

It has improved our organization in terms of providing more speed and reliability while being low maintenance. We're totally dependent upon it as we move forward.

There's nothing that I would add to it, except maybe on the dashboard. There could be a little more analytics. I would like to see some proactive warnings about maintenance issues. If we were to have an issue, I'd like some more advanced warning. I’d like to see some alerting features. We’ve only a few issues, but I would like to see some alerting improvements.

In terms of stability, It's a perfect fit. We have had no stability issues whatsoever.

It's been very scalable. Maintenance wise it's a non-issue.

We have used their 24-hour tech support. They've been very good and responsive. They meet the deadline.

Before choosing HPE, we looked at Dell. Between Dell and HPE, I think you get a lot of similar bells and whistles but I think in the end HPE is the king.

HPE has excellent maintenance agreements. They provide on-site, 24-hour response times. They deliver agreements. We're not ones to readily replace equipment so they have good extended warranties, which we rely on pretty regularly. This was one of the more important criteria because I work for a law firm and they're not big on shelling out money, unless they absolutely have to. We get the biggest bang for the buck with HPE. Again, I think it's the warranty service that you receive from the HPE that makes the difference. It's reliable. You should always shop around for price. Vendors are always willing to compete in the marketplace.

The most valuable features are reliability, the ease of implementation and setup. It's all wizard-driven. Also, maintenance on the devices, spare parts availability, and, as I’ve mentioned, reliability.

We've reduced the number of physical servers, currently. So, we've brought it down from 38 servers down to about 15. Seeing that we are standardizing, it's easier to support the devices, as we don't have that many different devices on-site that need to be supported.

I looked at the technologies offered at a recent HPE conference. There are a lot of technologies that are only offered on the high-end servers. As an example, the SSD module that's embedded on the memory; that's only available on the HP DL380. We've invested quite heavily in the HP DL360 G9s, which means that I won't have access to that technology. I would like it if there's a possibility, even if you have to pay an additional license, to enable that technology on the DL360s.

There's never a problem with it. It's always running. The reliability factor's quite high.

It has definitely been stable.

On the 3PAR, you just add devices as needed.

My previous employer, we were an HP house. Then when I started at the new company, I’ve noticed that they’ve got a mixed breed of technologies. It's not all industry or first-year suppliers or brands. I started the standardization strategy and obviously, HPE was the first choice.

The most important criteria when selecting HP were performance and reliability. I've got an existing relationship with a current supplier and, like I've mentioned before, I'm familiar with the brand and the technologies.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Dell and IBM rack servers.

Absolutely HPE. Absolutely happy with it.