HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The use cases attached to the solution can be anything on the database, or it can be a part of a cluster, like an HPC cluster, general-purpose servers, or ad servers. The tool's use cases can vary, and it all depends on the customers as to what exactly they want to start with and scale up.

The most valuable feature of the solution is HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO). HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) is a remote management platform from which you can remotely manage all the physical servers. HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) allows you to do many things, including power cycling of servers and deployment of applications monitoring of servers. In general, you can power cycle and restart servers with the help of the aforementioned feature.

When you speak of any enhancements in the product, you need to shift to the tool's commercial mode. You get more features in the solution if you pour in more money.

If a customer needs some features in the solution, they will have to buy it since certain features are not loaded by default in the server. With entry-level licenses, servers are shipped to customers free of cost. Customers need to pay if they want more and more features in the solution. Every OEM solution in the market, including HPE ProLiant DL, operates similarly.

The overall cost of the product needs to be lower, as it is one of the areas of concern in the product.

I have experience with HPE ProLiant DL for fifteen years. My company operates as a system integrator. My organization also has a partnership with HPE. My company currently uses HPE ProLiant Gen11 Servers.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The product offers excellent scalability. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company deals with more than 100 customers who use the product.

My company deals with SMBs, enterprise-sized businesses, and global customers who use the product.

The product's support team has been excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate the product's initial setup phase a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup phase, and ten is an easy setup process.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model around 90 percent of the time. Customers prefer to avail of the cloud services offered by AWS, Azure, or the services from some local partners in India.

The solution can be deployed in an hour. For racking and powering up the server, it takes a maximum of an hour.

For the deployment process, you need to fix the rack rail kit to install the server and then go for power on, after which you need to do the initial configuration check before going ahead with VoIP installation.

The product is expensive. I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. On the needs of the customers, the product offers a lot of support SLAs. Customers can choose a single point of contact for support.

My company's customers use Nutanix or VMware in their data centers for server consolidation and resource optimization.

The solution has been deployed for running virtualization workloads or hosting business-critical applications in our company's customers' organizations, as the product is built for certain purposes. If VMware is deployed on HPE ProLiant Gen11 Servers, users can use hypervisors in Nutanix or hypervisors in VMware.

The product's most beneficial features for improving IT infrastructure efficiency stem from the fact that the tool lasts for a long period for a customer. The life cycle of the servers is pretty good, and it is a proven fact since my company has seen customers using it for seven years, even in the production phase.

HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) improves IT infrastructure efficiency since it is an area where you see the consumption of the servers. You can monitor even 1,000 servers on a single pane of glass.

In terms of operational costs, you don't have to go to physical servers to do anything, as the tool does everything. With the tool, you can do 98 percent of the tasks remotely. People working in multiple branches across the world don't have to go and deploy the servers physically. From one place, users can control the servers from anywhere in the world with the help of HPE ProLiant DL. The tool reduces the operational costs and increases efficiency.

The product doesn't affect its customers' environment in any way. The product offers scalability and availability. That tool is also easy to deploy.

HPE has built the servers to last for decades, owing to which stability is one of the areas that HPE ProLiant DL has focused on when it comes to the solution.

The customers in India are not concerned about energy savings or reduced cooling costs after the implementation of the solution.

Whether the workload demands are met or not depends on what the customers want from the product in the beginning and how much they want to scale up.

Whether the workload demands are met depends on what the customers want from the product in the beginning and how much they want to scale up. My company offers solutions depending on whether the customers want to provision the product for the upcoming three or five years. Customers have to buy more servers if they want to scale up beyond a certain limit.

The product helps in the area of business growth.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. Before purchasing the product, people should consider their growth plan for the next three or five years. Until and unless there is a business plan in place, it is very difficult to figure out the requirements of the solution.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

We do work for defense and government clients. 

ProLiant servers are more reliable than other platforms.

My customers are tilted toward GPU users, and the mixed version of the enabled hard drives require — flash drives, SSD, NNL, and PLAS — all mixed and matched in a single box. These are requirements I've already shared with the HPE account manager. 

Customers want the tiering concept inside a box, which is currently part of the storage system, but customers require it in a server. They want the operating system over PLAS and the IO-related things on SSD.  The rest of their data is on NLSF. 

I've worked with ProLiant servers for 10 years. 

Stability is where HPE dominates competitors like Dell and Cisco. The servers are highly reliable, and we are impressed with the technology HPE offers.

Scalability in terms of GPUs and storage is a concern. 

I have a direct connection with the HPE account manager responsible for the government and defense verticals. I am happy with the person. We rely on our own in-house support for servers. However, we use a professional service for storage and three-power or CI systems.

HPE servers are highly user-friendly. It takes two or three hours from start to finish for bare-metal installation. With virtualization, it'll take four to six hours.

We are working with the customers in government and defense, where HPE already has a foothold. The requirements come from the customer, and they use HPE, so we do, too. We have to consider the customer's stability and comfort level. 

I rate HPE ProLiant Servers nine out of 10. In my country, it's better for customers to rely on the vendor who delivers the solution. We think the HPE server is better than others for that.

I am a technical manager and have technicians who go out to schools and look at their network. We have two servers that are linked to a SAN and run virtual servers to form a cluster. This is done so that the servers will always stay on even if one of them goes off. 

In regards to the components that you can put into the servers, I feel that HP provides a wider variety of parts in comparison to Dell. For example, there is the ILO which is a network cable that goes into the server and reports back with an abundance of information about the server, even when it is off.

I do not believe that improvements need to be made on the hardware side. 

On the software side, I would like for the management of the server overall (including reviewing its health) to be a bit easier. Right now, we have something that sits on the server to make sure all hardware drivers and other thing are up to date. This is a pain to set up.

We have been using this solution for a couple of years.

I like the stability. There are rarely any issues with the servers.

This is a scalable solution and I am able to put as much RAM in as I want.

We have not needed to contact support as most issues are able to be resolved by our in-house team and have yet to be severe enough to need to contact support.

The initial setup was not complex and took about half a day for one technician to set up. We have one technician who looks after the servers, but there is not much that needs to be done to them in regards to maintenance. Over holiday breaks we perform maintenance checks to ensure that everything is working properly.

We bought the server and desired bits and then had an in-house hardware technician come and put in the bits and install the service software on it through the ILO. 

We are able to get a few years out of the servers.

I like the price of this product and the add-on components. It is cheaper than Dell and is a one-time hardware purchase with minimal ongoing costs.

It is important to note that on some of the servers, you can only insert 2.5 inch drives, so, maximizing the SSDs may be a bit expensive.

Other than that, I would advise working with HP because they have reliable products that rarely have any issues and, when there are issues, they are easily resolvable by us. In the rare event that we cannot fix it, we are able to make returns at no additional costs.

Overall, I would rate the DL Servers a nine out of ten.

We have one SQL server, one repository called Solidworks Designs, and one called Karmatic.

The most valuable feature of the solution is scalability.

The licensing fees are expensive and have room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We purchased enough resources to ensure we could meet our requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward and took a few minutes. The deployment was simple. We only needed to install a Windows server.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have to pay for an annual license which is expensive.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We have twenty people using the solution in our organization and plan to increase that number to 30.

We require five people to maintain the solution consisting of managers and automation engineers.

I recommend the solution to others.

The ProLiant server is where we install our monitoring tools. We are only utilizing about half of its total capacity. We need to install more memory and other hardware to maximize our usage. We're close to the minimum. We have around 20 users for this project across two departments. 

Our monitoring tool has a database, so we need a server with a fast IO. 

I have been using ProLiant servers for three years

The server hasn't failed in three years. Typically, it takes about five years before the power supply or hardware fails.

We configure the server as a standalone. It's not clustered to scale out. We are only just scaling up by installing additional RAM and other hardware as necessary.

At my old company, we used HPE's Blade server.

It's straightforward but requires a little more configuration than Dell because this HPE has an ILO where you can run an independent operating system. A system integrator deployed the server, which took less than a day. Our deployment and maintenance team consists of four engineers and one manager. We followed the installation guide and the standard steps for installing a Windows operating system.

Configuring the ILO operating system added some additional steps that weren't required with Dell. It's running Windows 7 ILO, a step higher than Dell's operating system.

I believe we have seen a return. However, the software accounts for the large cost, so ROI is difficult to calculate from a hardware perspective.

HPE ProLiant servers are priced about the same as Dell's, maybe a little more. 

I rate HPE ProLiant servers nine out of 10. I would recommend them if you live in an area where HPE has a strong support presence. In Qatar, HPE doesn't have as much support as Dell. I would recommend Dell if given the option because it has a solid local presence.

We primarily use the solution in our company and our client's company.

I trust the hardware mostly. 

There are some features like intelligent provisioning, et cetera, which are quite useful.

The ILO for management is great.

It's scalable.

The solution is stable and reliable. 

I want to improve hyper-converged sites. We are mostly working with the DL series, however, now we are trying to work with more hyper-converged.

I've used the solution for more than 20 years. 

We are really happy with HP ProLiant Servers. They are stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We find the solution to be scalable. 

At this time, we have more than 100 users on the solution. 

We work with clients that have companies that vary in size, from small to large.

Technical support has been great. I have been quite satisfied with their level of assistance.

We use ProLiant Servers and SimpliVity. We've also worked with Dell. The quality of HP is better here in Turkey. It's faster, and they come with spare parts. There's a shorter timeframe to replace hardware if parts are defective. 

How difficult or straightforward the implementation process is depends on the customer's location. We have lots of customers in Turkey. Some of them are complex, and some of them are simple.

We have three admins that can handle maintenance tasks. 

While the price is okay, the price of Dell is lower. 

I'm a reseller. We are HPE partners.

I'd advise users to try HP. It's a good solution. However, it depends on the customer. Some prefer working with Dell. If a company already has Dell infrastructure, we advise them to continue with Dell to have a homogenous environment. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

When you compare hyper-converged with ProLiant, hyper-converged is more available due to the clusters; you can cluster it. However, for ProLiant, you have to find a solution with VMware or something like that, for example,  third-party solutions. That said, on the hardware side, ProLiant has no cluster option.

With HPE ProLiant, you can run a Windows operating system or a Linux OS based on Intel architecture. We also use several applications like iLO to manage the servers within the architecture of our serverless AMD processors. 

Alternatively, you can use another monitoring solution like HP OneView to manage ProLiant Servers. It's a product for monitoring and managing the servers. In addition to monitoring software, ProLiant can be managed with a cloud-based solution. For example, HP's cloud-based InfoSight solution lets you monitor your server and storage, including ProLiant and Intel. 

ProLiant can be mounted in different types of server racks, like a CD or tower. The tower solution of ProLiant is for a small site or office. With this type of tower server, you can add a kit as well. ProLiant has several servers: 150, 350, 380. And there is another ProLiant architecture that you can install in a Synergy and BladeSystem enclosure. 

HPE's iLO server management software is a handy tool to install and deploy. OneView is also suitable for management, but you need a license for it. You can use OneView's monitoring features for free, but you need to pay for management capabilities. In the latest generation, Gen10, you have to add a license for iLO. In addition, generation 10 requires an ISO license to use iLO for management. And if you're working with Synergy, there is another new product like SimpliVity. SimpliVity has a helpful product that is based on ProLiant and another type of architecture similar to Apollo.

It would be great if HP could use a ProLiant Server to run HP-UX, the Unix build from HPE. Right now, HP-UX cannot run on the ProLiant architecture. So if HP made HP-UX compatible with ProLiant Servers, it would be pretty helpful. On the other hand, Linux is also replacing HP-UX, so maybe HP doesn't need to integrate this architecture into ProLiant. 

If you look at ProLiant's trajectory, I think the next generation will be focused on adding memory. Currently, there is a gap in the memory technology, so I'm predicting that the internal disk for the next generation of ProLiant will be RAM only. I believe this high-speed disk will be available in the next generation. I think the disk will be integrated into the RAM architecture. 

With the improved RAM architecture, the disk will be faster than the first-class disk because there are other protocols between memory and disk. If you have your disk, you look at the disk in terms of the motherboard. If you add to the processor, it would be faster. All disks in this architecture will be in the solution's memory.

I've been working with ProLiant for almost 10 years. And two or three months ago, I implemented several ProLiant Servers running Windows. It was a very short project — a  small solution for a small customer. The majority of my experience has been with HPE servers like ProLiant and Integrity. I've been working with HPE products for about 18 years, including HPE infrastructure, storage, and servers products. So I've been working with HPE since my first job after I graduated.

ProLiant Servers are stable because they have redundant elements built in.

I would say ProLiant Servers are scalable, but it also depends on the architecture. You can scale up with Synergy. For example, you can add two servers into one node. So if it's part of the cluster, it also depends on the operating system that's running. 

When our customers deploy a ProLiant server, we're usually the ones providing support. We have a three-year contract for hardware and software support. The procedure for escalating to HP is pretty straightforward. You contact an HP call center then they verify your system handle or serial. If the server has an active contract, the response from the engineer depends on the conditions of the contract. Some contracts are six hours. That means they're going to solve your problem in six hours.

Installing ProLiant is straightforward. There are different ways you can deploy. You can deploy it locally using the graphical user interface, or you also have the option to set it up using a shell. You only need some basic knowledge to install ProLiant. The procedure is pretty similar to setting up a PC or a laptop. ProLiant has an array of tools, so you can easily install the servers without any experience. The installer has a simple Windows-based GUI, so you just click through the wizard and provide some information to the servers. 

You don't need a deep understanding of the architecture. If you have a fundamental knowledge of operating systems like Windows, you can handle this with no problem. Also, HP has a lot of information available online, including video tutorials on installing your ProLiant Servers. HP has several channels to provide information for customers and engineers.

The time needed to deploy depends on the scale and your environment. If you want to deploy just one ProLiant server, it takes maybe 30 minutes. If you're going to deploy a Synergy of BladeSystem with different modules inside, you might need to spend an entire workday on it. Maybe it takes a day to install all your servers or maybe less. But installing a single ProLiant rack-based server can be done in 30 minutes, including installing the operating system. Installing the operating system, updating your system, etc., will take maybe 30 or 40 minutes.

10 out of 10. The latest generation is the best, but Generation 6 was very stable. It was a good one. Now Generation 10 is the best. I don't know why they took so long to upgrade this generation. Still, Generation 10 has improved a lot in memory and processing, so you can operate in an environment that supports ProLiant. That's why I think HP-UX will disappear because Linux can run this environment on the ProLiant architecture very well.

For example, the range of velocity and processor speed is four or five times greater than before. You can run every Linux environment, which can replace the Unix environment. You can run this Linux environment inside the ProLiant and get the same service as a Unix environment. That's why Linux and ProLiant run very well.

The most valuable features are redundancy, flexibility, and compatibility with operating systems.

The cost and the user experience are two of the main benefits.

In the next release, I would like to see more redundancy of the CPU. That would be great.

The solution is very stable. We have had it for more than ten years, for several generations of the product. It's a very stable solution.

The first version was not so scalable. Today’s versions are very scalable. We are very, very happy with this new version.

We have a maintenance contract for support from the HPE team around the world. We don't use it so much because the solution is very stable. When we do use it, the quality depends on the country. For example, in France, it works very well. However, when we try it in China, it can be a little bit tricky.

We used another solution from another company. However, the cost vs. benefit was not so good. For that reason, we switched to HPE services.

I was involved with the setup. It was very easy to apply.

We worked with Dell and IBM, but we chose HPE.

When selecting a vendor, it's good to have a real relationship in order to get a reliable, ascertainable, and a flexible solution. With this solution, you can close your eyes and you can use it because it's a very stable and personable tool. There is a real relationship between HPE and the customer, and they support you during all the steps you take.