HPE Superdome X Reviews

We are a university. We use this solution for both research activity and teaching activities. Mainly, it's used for running complex research jobs.

We don't use Superdome for specific applications. It's used in a departmental engineering laboratory, so use cases depend on the kind of research we do. 

Typically, we virtualize the machine so we can allocate different virtual machines with different operating systems for various purposes. So, the main use case is to run diverse research jobs.

It was a significant improvement in workload management. Previously, we didn't have this kind of machine. Now, with this machine, we're able to run completely new workloads.

So it expanded your horizons in this area. We invest in these technologies precisely to extend our horizons.

We don't run mission-critical applications. However, we did see performance improvements because this product allows us to expand the adoption of modern technologies by different researchers. We invest in these technologies to create a data center that improves our overall research productivity output. So these technologies definitely contribute to that improvement.

HPE Superdome X is used in my data center for our core banking application.

The most valuable features of HPE Superdome X are speed, performance, and resilience.

This product is a file server and we use it to host SAP ERP.

The most valuable feature is the high availability.

Availability. Basically it's availability, in a product that can handle the workload. It has features that will give the most uptime possible for applications.

Reliability.

SDX gave us a very large RAM and we need that for the large-scale graph-handling applications. Those turn up in genomics for genome sequence assembly and in metagenomics. Now, people are even doing things like metatranscriptomics and those algorithms and applications right now require a very large RAM. They're not distributed, at least, not for what the biologists are commonly using in the field; we need it for that. We, also, need it for some machine-learning and large-scale Java workflows that also don't distribute.

Benefits of the SDX, to me, are having a very large RAM. We chose 12 terabytes as the sweet spot. We could have gone higher with the higher-density dims and a very high bandwidth backplane, i.e., connecting the blades into the ccNUMA architecture.

It's big. One of the really cool things about Superdome is, depending on the model you choose, you can put 8-16 blades in it, but because of the structure and the engineering behind it, you can actually have your blades partitioned and they're actually physically divided. You can view it as a separate server and I think that's pretty cool, and the fact that it can scale up. 

It always comes down to OS. I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported.

We've got a few of them, because we needed some really large machines. So far, they've been working pretty good.

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 performance and scalability.

We put a system on this which has a student information system which has attendance, grading, and all student information. We have 35,000 teachers which at least five to six thousand concurrent users there. You need a high performance machine to support that kind of concurrency. CPU and memory, it's just pretty good and helps us to support the students and the teachers of the school.