HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

They are good because we can isolate the customer's various stuff onto machines that have everything dedicated, rather than being a blade, where I share stuff with others and they do something dumb.

What would make it better from my point of view is if HPE spent more time on testing with the actual built-in Red Hat Linux drivers, as opposed to always trying to say, "Use our driver."

The stability is pretty good.

It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling; application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.

The technical support sucks, would be understating it, because the first line and the second line support tend to give out stupid suggestions that are completely useless, and they aren't listening to anything. It takes a lot of time to get through them, and that is every call I've been on with them. Oftentimes, I've got a very low expectation of HPE, and they go below my expectation a few times.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

We have some IBM machines, but we're mostly an HPE shop. I believe the only reason we bought the IBM was because at the time, HPE didn't have the feature we needed.

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.

We like the reliability of the server. We also like the iLO abilities of the server ... that's what my guys like the most.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

I think maybe just improving the manageability since we would like a single pane of glass. I think there may be a few features that my team might want to see added. We use it a lot for VMware so anymore things that they can tightly integrate with VMware would be great.

We've had other vendors trying to pitch similar hardware to us but it's something we don't even consider just because of the stability and the reliability of the HPE hardware.

That's a non-issue for us. They're easy to scale especially with the blade chassis. We stack several of them into a rack, stick in more blades whenever we need to.

We don't use them very often. Usually we have a minor issue, a hard drive or something like that so we really don't use it very often but when we need to, it's always very good.

The Dell servers were four to five years old. They were already getting close to end of life and end of support, so it was time to upgrade.

It was straightforward. At the time, we were a very small shop. I think we replaced six Dell servers that were there at the time with six ProLiants. Since then, our company has grown tenfold. Now we still have a few of the rack mount ProLiant’s but we have six blade chassis that we're now using.

I left my position as a system engineer at HPE into this company, and I knew the ProLiants inside and out. That was the selling point right there, and we didn't look at anything else.

I would tell them to strongly take a look at the HPE. Go ahead and do a bake off if you want to. If they want to prove a concepts with the Dells, Dells will give them a way to you to try them out. If you rack them up side-by-side, I think all the features set and just the reliability of HPE makes them come out ahead.

The scalability. We use it for our infrastructure because we keep up with the latest generation of technology and so the scalability, the form factor, everything plays well into our data center infrastructure.

It's helpful to have standardized platforms, and so from that standpoint it works very well for our environment at our company because we have a vast distributed data center infrastructure across multiple locations so it helps to have standardized platforms to reduce operating expense and extend the lifecycle of the product. It would just be ease of maintainability and standardization to minimize.

The number of CPUs and maybe administrative interfaces. Nothing that I would site as a concern now. It's the continued maturing of the platform. There's always room for growth but I can't point to more specifics.

It's scalable just based on the physical placements of the hardware and the white space involved on the floor.

We have others that handle any deployment issues.

The more we're able to standardize on a single platform, it lowers our long term cost and it lowers support cost. I think it can be expensive, but in our particular function, we don't get involved in that aspect. The funding aspects are a totally different group, so as long as the technical parameters are met, we don't address that.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition, I don't get involved.

The DL380 generation 8 has slots for hard drives in the front. This really separates it from competitors such as Dell. I need that kind of local storage space for each server, which I can make from eight drives. This is like a RAID 6 set-up so that I don't have to worry about just one broken hard drive. We'll automatically get an SNMP problem error from the broken drive.

Very simply, we needed a stable server, and this is a stable server.

I'm worried that with the new model, HP will get rid of the processor ILO port that enables us to have a separated management network. I don't think it'll be feasible to have some models with the ILO port and some without.

I'd also like to see faster memory chips.

I also think that there's an issue with the Smart Array firmware, which is the RAID controller. It corrupts RAID 6 so that if you have an entire setup that's based on RAID 6, the whole RAID will also be corrupted.

We haven't had any deployment issues.

It's quite stable.

I don’t need to scale. Their cage is stand-alone boxes.

I haven't used them for these servers, but I've found them slow for other things.

We were using Dell, which were almost the same as the DL380.

It's straightforward. Putting that kind of server into the rack now is something like 50 minutes.

They are very easy to build and very reliable. On a server, that's the most important thing: reliability. Everything is locked together. They're just nice and quick and easy.

Servers are all about reliability and the HP ProLiant is well priced. You can get other reliable servers, but you're going to pay much more. These are very well priced for what they are.

I find the software for the servers can sometimes be a bit flaky. Upgrades can be flaky, too. For example, you get the HP easy set-up when you want to set up one from scratch. It's not uncommon that when you have to phone HP, they say, "Well you can't use the latest version, go back two versions," or that kind of thing. I would say where they control the servers, that's where they let themselves down. They let themselves down on their software.

They're very stable. With HP servers, you turn them on and you can forget about them. That's why we use them; that's why we like them. Very rarely will HP servers actually go down and give you a hassle.

Scalability depends which ones you buy. They are scalable and you can add to them the whole time. You can add drives and processors. You just have to make sure that the server you buy is scalable because there's no point buying a single processor server if you think one day you might need four processors. You've got to allow for scalability when you buy the server. You've got to be thinking forward.

On the whole, I would say their tech support is quite good. They always come back to you. The only people I can really compare them to in that price range would be Dell. You can't compare as the HP tech support is much, much better than Dell. It's easier to get through and they're more helpful when you actually get them on the phone.

At this price range we've bought Dell and we've bought IBM. We wouldn't go back to either of them. We would, however, go back to HP with no problem. If someone really wants a cheap server, they should go with Fujitsu because it's good value for money. But you can't compare their build quality to HP. HP build quality is much better.

Dell servers are very nice although sales service is diabolical. IBM -- just didn't like the build. Very fiddly, not easy to put together, wasn't intuitive. HP servers -- you get the parts and it's intuitive. You know exactly what you're doing; it's easy. Also, the IBM servers were very, very noisy. With Fujitsu, it just comes down to price.

They're reliable and they never break. They're very manageable. The management tools that are available are excellent. We've looked at other solutions in the past, and we always conclude that we don't want to move away from ProLiant and the BladeSystem. They just work, which is basically what our requirement is.

Particularly in the pre-HP days, with Compaq, we used to buy bigger servers, but we've got to a point now where we basically only buy two types of servers, either the ProLiant DL380 or the BL460 Blades. We don't buy any other hardware.

We're a very small IT group within the enterprise and we haven't got the money or the time to be spending tons of time configuring stuff out and messing around with it, fixing it when it breaks, and that kind of thing. It's a low-maintenance solution. Essentially, we don't have to do much of that with ProLiant, so it's absolutely a good fit for us.

The only improvement would be cost. If they keep driving the costs down -- and I don't think they're expensive for what you're getting -- they'd keep everybody happy.

We've been using HP ever since they were available as Compaq.

We've never had any deployment issues.

We've used them for many, many years and we get very few hardware issues.

It scales just fine.

They're really good. I've never had any issues. The few times that we do have to call HP, they always help us out.

It's quite hard comparing other solutions because I've been solely on ProLiant for so long now I don't have too much to compare to. Although, I looked at Fuji Systems a couple of years ago and it's just massively complex for no apparent reason. I don't see a better fit for our company.

We are using these servers as cluster nodes. We are running VM with Hyper-V.

This product is feature-rich and is easy to install.

Sometimes, there are connectivity issues and the server is not able to connect to our SAN. One example is when we reboot from SAN storage, we face issues such as not being able to detect the SAN port. After we installed two new physical hard disks, that issue went away. It should be more stable.

We have been using the ProLiant DL Servers for the past four years.

These servers are stable, although sometimes there are connectivity issues. We do plan to continue using them in the future.

This is a scalable product. We have a five-node cluster with close to 3,500 users using different applications.

Technical support is rapid and very good. They take our calls immediately and resolve issues within four to five hours. The last time we had an issue, it was resolved immediately.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy. It will take about an hour to deploy, from scratch.

We deployed this product ourselves.

We have a data center team and a NOC team, with seven people who are managing these servers.

This is a good product and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.