HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

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.

It has 26 internal disc slots and will take 12 gig SAS discs. We needed to run a SQL server availability groups on a pair of these, and we needed to be able build a high-speed, high-performance disc array to hold our data. The DL380 Gen-9, along with the P830 controller card with the SAS expander, gives us phenomenal performance on 10K SAS discs. They outperformed our existing SAN by a factor of 8 to 10 times.

These replaced old Dell servers and have half the footprint, being as they're a 2U server. They also used half the power. They saved us considerable amounts of money and hosting costs with our data center. Deploying these servers actually saves us money.

I can't see how you can fit much more into a small server, to be quite honest. If I was to be really picky, it needs to not drop the memory speed when you fill all the memory slots, which is a real niggle, but other than that, they've worked so well. They've done so much for us in cutting our hosting costs over the original four way boxes that these replaced. Their performance is absolutely phenomenal.

They've deployed for us without any issues.

Absolutely stunning. We also use the Gen8 on some of our other systems and the key systems that I support -- our ARP CRM and ticket and billing system. Our billing systems handles roughly two-and-a-half billion pounds a year. It's very critical.

They seem to scale brilliantly, but it's difficult to tell. Our company is a constantly growing business. Our expansion is vast -- twenty percent or more last year. The systems are still holding up really well. In fairness, we specked them up and we benchmark these servers, so the particular way we had these servers built was specific to our use, but they do really well.

We did with the original install, the Gen9's that we had. We had some of the first Gen9's that were released. We did have a slight pickup with a BIOS setting, but HP support sorted that one for us.

I inherited the Dell servers from a legacy. I just replaced them with the HP servers. Those are my preferred choice, always. Without being detrimental to Dell, we don't like their servers very much, and the HP ones have always been far better.

There are concerns about the HPE team in the Southeast Asia region, suggesting a need for improvements in terms of responsiveness. There have been instances where the response time was slow, causing challenges during urgent situations. Its stability also needs to improve. 

I have been using the product for five years. 

We haven't received any complaints about the tool's stability. It works properly in a five-year lifetime. 

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The product's competitor is Dell. 

The solution's deployment was easy. 

The solution's pricing is high. It needs to be more flexible. The flexibility would be beneficial for our clients, especially in a competitive market. Adding additional features and addressing complex requirements on top of the price can be challenging for us as a reseller.

In project tenders, system requirements are specified, including the number of cores, storage, and personnel needed. The information is shared with the HPE team to prepare a BQ specifying the server model to be used. The tool is a good physical server. 

The choice of server category or type is not specific and varies case by case. Customers may initially purchase higher servers than their immediate requirements, anticipating future use cases. It's a complex decision and depends on individual circumstances.

The product's roadmap seems to be good. Its deployments are mostly on-prem due to government regulations.

The product is purchased specifically for security solutions, not for the entire data center stack. It is recommended for medium to enterprise-level customers. 

I rate the overall solution an eight 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.

We are using it for serving the VMware environment and creating all of our virtual servers and desktops.

The GPU units, processor speed, and capabilities are most valuable. Desktop video conferencing is also valuable. It supports desktop video conferencing much better for graphics.

They should work with Microsoft to make licensing costs better. That's because the physical servers have processors with all these cores, and Microsoft now licenses Windows virtual server desktops based on the number of cores and the serving servers. So, if you got to build 10 or 20 servers on that desktop, you got to license them all with Microsoft. They should have a partnership with Microsoft to decrease the virtual licensing of servers in partnerships so that when you purchase the servers, you also get licensing for Microsoft on top of them. That's because it gets very expensive to license virtual operating systems to run on physical servers.

I have been using this solution for 10 years, but these are refreshed. So, they're new. We have hardly used them.

It is solid. We didn't face any issues.

Its scalability is great. We have 150 users, and it is being used heavily. We are taking every bit of life out of it we can. We don't have any plans to increase its usage.

Their technical support is great. It is fantastic.

We have only used HPE.

It is easy. Getting them up and running is a piece of cake, but getting the VMware environment operation on them is very complicated.

It has been a couple of months so far, and we're still working on it.

We are implementing it in-house. We are growing that skill internally. I got a rockstar guy doing all that. I don't do it on my own. 

For its maintenance, we have one network administrator.

They need to work with Microsoft to make the licensing costs better and more efficient.

It is a good product. I would rate it a nine out of 10 because it has good support and good performance.

We use it for the 12 VMs we have on it. We are using VMware.

It's very useful.

It's easy to upgrade, and it is very easy to take care of the firmware upgrades.

With a complete bootable CD, we can do the upgrades quite remotely and pretty easily.

A black mark that we felt with HPE is that it failed within four to six months of use, even after it was addressed with HPE. 

The implementation should be simplified, it is not straightforward.

The product should be better tested before they send it to the end-user.

The stability needs improvement.

Support could be improved to be faster in responding.

We just purchased HPE ProLiant DL Servers six months ago.

We are using the latest version.

At this point in time, I would not say that it is a very stable product, because of the bad experience that we had.

It is scalable to a certain extent. Not very much, but at least 20% scalable.

We have 300 users in our organization.

We contacted technical support for the issues that we were facing. 

I found them to be quite slow in their response.

We could put up with the delay because it had just been brought in, and the applications were being transferred.

In fairness, it could have been because of the COVID issue. But I found them to be pretty slow.

Previously we were using Dell, and we switched from Dell to HPE.

We have been very dedicated users of Dell and never had any issues with them. Unfortunately, we had to switch to HPE for a specific reason.

We switched from Dell because of some specific requirements that could not be met with Dell. Also, we switched because of some financial issues. Dell was more expensive and we couldn't afford it at that time.

It wasn't straightforward.

We had some issues with some failures initially. Though it was taken care of by HPE, we still had some failures, which was surprising.

We have a team of ten admins, engineers, managers, and data entry guys to maintain and deploy this solution.

We had the help of the HPE service providers.

We have purchased this solution and it is under warranty. It is more economical than some other products.

We will continue to use this solution, as we have purchased it and can't afford to just throw it away. If we continue to have further issues, we will consider changing it over.

With my current experience, I could not recommend this product to others.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The most valuable features for us are remote management, high load, and resilience. We're a small team but we have servers in Moscow, Milan, and other places. This is a solution that allows us to be in those different places.

We only have support staff in North America and in Europe, so it enables us to offer support globally in our other offices. If there's an issue in the Sydney office, we can log on remotely, needing very little work. The main benefit is less manpower, which means that if there's an issue at 3:00 in the morning in the US, I can do the work rather than having to get somebody else to do the work.

I'd like to see more features in the iLO as it currently only provides a basic overview. Sometimes the part or serial numbers are missing, for example. We've had issues where power supplies or hard drives have become defective and the information gets pulled back into the error logs. We then have to physically look into the server. This is highly inconvenient and an annoyance which could be solved with more iLO features.

We get the odd hard drive or power supply or general failure issues, but there aren't major stability issues we've noticed.

If we've got clusters with a specific chip set, we can't easily introduce more once the chip becomes end-of-line. We have to build an entirely new cluster and migrate things over with the way we've implemented it.

We have technical support through a third party and through HP. It seems relatively straightforward -- just go online, fill in the details, and you normally get contacted in 30-60 minutes.

I've primarily been with HP throughout my career. I've used IBMs and Dells in the past, very briefly, but I've never really got on with them. I find that the support and the tools that come with HP servers are far better.

I've only been with the company about 18 months. The majority of the setup was done prior to me joining.

Make sure you get what you actually need rather than overpaying for something. Consider the different chips and memory that you can buy off the shelf. Make sure you're not over-spec or under-spec. Take your time.

I would say it's well documented and you can find exactly what the configuration is easily as well as the drivers and other documentation that they require to get a junior staff member up and running on the platform.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

I would say that for us, as we're moving to more of a cloud based solution, we're looking for ways that you can take machines that you can't put in a private cloud instance and how those can be managed from a single user interface.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't break.

This is something that we're going into right now with HP as we've built out a stack of these machines. In the future we're planning on moving to more of a cloud based architecture.

They want to add more sites and it's just not good for us to add in another rack of equipment for every site.

Technical support gets to the parts where we need it. Like any product, it fails occasionally, right? But we built the system to survive and HP is still there to support us.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Work with HP to pilot before you go buy it.