HPE Synergy Reviews

Our standalone servers and Windows hypervisors are running on the product.

It is a good product for hypervisors. The performance is fine.

The firmware, software, and driver levels must be improved. The product should be stabilized as soon as possible. Some hardware of the product was not in good condition. We faced some issues within six months. We requested HPE to replace them. The solution must concentrate on improving the product quality.

I have been using the solution for more than two to three years.

The tool is stable. I rate the product’s stability a seven or eight out of ten. We faced a few hardware failures.

The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. There were some limitations on some hardware. Around 8000 people use the product in my organization.

The solution provides good support. The support team will be available on-site for any new installation or configuration needs. In middle-east, HPE’s support team is far better than any other company. Support is important.

We were using a different solution before. We switched to HPE because of the support provided by them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment took one or two hours. A consultant from HPE helped us deploy the product. We needed one or two people to deploy the tool.

The license comes with the solution.

The solution is periodically making improvements. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

• Graphical workstations
• Replacing the c7000 systems
• Analytics
• DevOps, using containers.

We bought it with the intent to replace the c7000 workstation blades. It is bigger than the workstation blades in core count, memory, and graphical capabilities. So, it has broadened us in that regard, and we have more capabilities.

It is very easy to reproduce. We have a bare metal kickstart and deployment process, which are very quick and easy. We haven't yet taken advantage of the Image Streamer capabilities of the product just yet.

• Flexibility
• iLO
• The interface to the back-end
• CPUs
• Memory
• Graphics capabilities

It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure.

We are all about graphics. I know that the Synergy has a sidecar on it, so innovation into graphics capabilities and more broadly used storage. Right now, we have 180 blades and 15 frames, but our only solution for storage is either onboard the blade itself or some network-based storage. We could probably bring some Fibre Channel into play. However, we would maybe like to see some innovation around the storage and those systems.

It still has some room to grow. For our solution, we need something between the c7000 and Synergy. Synergy is the high-end deployment, and we're still learning to how to do the composable infrastructure, so we can turn it around and make it look like this today and that tomorrow. The c7000 gave us a stable workstation remodel. We went from an Acura to a Maserati, needing something in between.

It is not very stable because of the image streaming and the issues that we had with it, which were more software-based. The hardware is very stable. The software which runs the hardware part is where we had our biggest problems with it.

It scales really well. We have 15 frames of Synergy with five racks. It has three frames per rack, so it scales really well.

On a scale of one to 10, the technical support is probably a six. It got better as we got deeper into the Tiered support. The initial support with its Tier 1 and 2 support weren't very useful or helpful at all. It was only when we engaged our Salesforce to help us get into the backdoor to talk to their Tier 3 team did we start to see things circulate.

It was communicated through to the sales team who supports us. We were looking for a replacement solution for the HPE c7000 workstation class blades, and this is what was recommended as a solution.

The initial setup was very complex. The cabling was such that it had to be done a certain way. It is one of those things that you want to not touch once it's stood up. That is our initial impression.

We did use Professional Services to help us deploy the Image Streamer and database back-end. They set it up and left. We had to reconfigure it and move it from rack to rack. That is when it broke, then we had to reengage those people again.

We have seen ROI. We have the ability to quickly compute. Instead of in the traditional way, one of the nice things that Synergy brings is that it is a big enough platform. We are putting a hypervisor on the system and carving off a portion of that to attach it to the graphics card,  then the remainder of the CPU and memory are available for virtual compute.

The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually.

When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it.

It reduced our IT infrastructure cost by a little because of the amount of capacity and it is bigger. I only have 12 blades in Synergy, where in the c7000, I had 16 blades. I lost four systems for customers in the way that we deploy systems.

We like HPE because of the technology they bring to bear. Other competitors have blade systems, but they don't have graphics enablement. HPE also has a product called RGS, which we use very heavily. That partnership alone is huge. Thus, we have a huge investment in HPE.

Ask more questions to challenge the answers that the sales community gives. We went into the product thinking that we knew the product previously. That it just needed to be a maturation of the product, and it wasn't. I would poke more technical questions at them. Sometimes, with the bleeding edge, you have to be careful. We were one of the first adopters of it, and some of the bugs were still in it when we were ready for production work, so maybe it wasn't production ready.

It is a good, stable product. It will become more mature. Ask the questions of your sales team and the technical solution architect, ensuring that it's for you. Consider the total cost of ownership, and maybe starting out simpler.

It is touted to be composable. However, we haven't used it as composable. It is more of a replacement for an existing service right now.

The deployment time stayed about the same, because we deployed the same way.

It has added value to the process. It impacted us initially when we were deploying it. We were trying to troubleshoot the problem when we should have been under production, and we were about eight months behind deployment because of it. So, it impacted us in a negative way. With total cost of ownership, once we determine how to start using the composable infrastructure, it should add to that.

The primary use case of HPE Synergy is for invoicing. Our Brazil office uses the solution as we do not have Oracle ERP there. It is a legacy system.

HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years. Our offices in Brazil do not want to change.

There really isn't any valuable feature. Our team in Brazil does not want to change, and that is why it's still running there. They have not improved their product since it was purchased. I would like to see the product be compatible with Oracle invoicing or Salesforce invoicing.

HPE Synergy should be easier to use and integrate with other databases like Tableau and with the cloud. It is difficult to integrate with cloud-based data sets. I also would like to see better customization ability.

I have been using HPE Synergy for 15 years.

The solution is stable. It has been running for 15 years.

HPE Synergy is not scalable. If you have a bigger workload or have more invoices, it is not scalable. You need to stay within a certain capacity. We have over 150 users from payroll and accounting using this product.

HPE Synergy supports the product, but not in terms of enhancing the product. I would rate customer service and support a four out of five.

Neutral

I worked with Oracle and Salesforce. Both of those solutions are easy to customize to the needs of each of our organization's structures. They each have some unique needs. Oracle and Salesforce are ready to provide those types of customizations quickly. HPE Synergy does not accommodate these types of customizations.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are providing solutions to our end customers. So I work in a distributor company, so we are still using this product and providing solutions to the store.

It's Blade Service, and this is a very agile product. It is for enterprise customers, not SMBs. Our Hyperconverged and Nimble are more suitable for SMBs or mid-market customers. Synergy is mostly for an enterprise-level business that has big requirements.

This is cloud-enabled. For example, data can be migrated from the cloud to these products. Synergy data from the public cloud can be migrated to Synergy and from Synergy to the public cloud. 

The composability is great. This infrastructure is more composable. For example, programmers are not dependent on the infrastructure team to provide service. The infrastructure is more programmable in the Synergy system. Any programmer can just run a single line of code, and a virtual machine will be ready. 

It allows for easy management. It is very simple. With a single user interface, we can manage all of Synergy.

This is a product more suited to enterprises. It's not for small companies. 

The cost is quite high. 

I've been using the solution for the last five years. 

We have between 500 and 1,000 users. They are in different regions and different areas, and therefore it is hard to estimate how many people are on the product.

The implementation was pretty fast. It's easy to manage and integrates well with everything. Sometimes integrating storage with other vendors can be a bit tricky. However, it can be done. 

This is an expensive solution. While they offer lifetime licensing, subscription options are also available. 

This is an on-premises solution that is cloud-enabled. 

If the customer requirement is more than 100 virtual machines and they are looking for virtualization and bare metal servers, then they should go for Synergy virtualization plus bare metals.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We have deployed HPE Synergy in a data center. Customers are using HPE Synergy for production running VMware Hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, and standalone servers. However, the customers are mostly using it for the VR solution.

The most valuable features of HPE Synergy are the two composers.

Over the two years of using HPE Synergy, we have found some hardware failures that are frequent in the SOP models, CNA cards, and converged network adapters. These failures are frequently happening for a lot of the customers.

I have been using HPE Synergy for approximately five years.

HPE Synergy is stable.

The scalability of HPE Synergy is good.

The support from  HPE Synergy is very good.

The initial setup of HPE Synergy for us is straightforward. We provide the knowledge to our customers if they choose to deploy it themselves. However, when the customers do the process it takes time and is technically demanding.

HPE Synergy is not difficult to maintain.

We have worked with the HPE technical team for Synergy cases. For example, for firmware upgrades, security purposes, and vulnerabilities.

There is a perpetual license given when you purchase HPE Synergy.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE Synergy a ten out of ten.

We use it for public cloud right now. It covers a plethora of workloads. We have everything from the small, mom-and-pop, five-user accounting shop running QuickBooks, all the way up to data analytics running machine-learning on it.

The main improvement has been around being able to expand the environment without building out additional infrastructure. We have the blade chassis set up. We throw an extra blade in there and we've just expanded our compute and ram. It's made it much easier for us to grow the infrastructure, once we put the foundation in place.

In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity. That's really is what it comes down to. We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with it.

The solution has helped us to implement new business requirements quickly. We deployed the 8180 processor from Intel with it, which helped us empower much faster compute. We have actually been able to pick up more of those machine-learning clients.

In addition, our IT infrastructure team is more efficient. We have fewer teams, fewer people associated with it. It has also affected the productivity of our development team, now. At the beginning, they didn't know how to utilize it, but now that they've been able to bridge into it a little bit more, it's sped them up.

For example, we run our own panel and customer-interface platforms which are built in-house. They bring stats from the compute node and they bring stats from the RAM utilization into a customer portal that is API-driven. That one was always very hard because all of the infrastructure that we'd stand up was a bunch of 1Us. When a new cluster would come in, they would have to write the code for that cluster and it would take them a week or two just to put the right code together and deliver it to the customer. Now they've written it for the whole Synergy platform, so we just slide a blade in and it comes online.

The solution has also decreased our deployment time. On average, we deploy a private cloud in about two weeks: Buying the nodes, racking and stacking, and then applying VMware to it. From there we, would install the OSs, etc. We've cut out the racking and stacking. We've cut out a lot of the physical deploy time. Now, we buy the blades and put them in an open slot. The networking is already set up, the infrastructure is already set up, so it's just VMware and the OSs, which cuts us down to about 60 percent of the time it used to take.

The most valuable feature is the control of the overall solution all in one box. With it being all together, it has really taken down the complexity of a multi-environment. Switches being top of rack, storage being separate. It's moved it all into one box.

There is room for improvement in the setup.

It's stable. It hasn't given us a problem yet. No outages.

It's very scalable. We like the idea that we can put four chassis in one of our racks, and we can connect up to 25 chassis, so the scalability to us, and being able to sync all those into one management portal, is unheard of. You can't really sync that many blades and chassis together in any other platform.

Technical support is good. We had a struggle at the beginning. What happened was that we reached out and they didn't really understand what we were trying to do. We got more of the leadership from HPE involved and said, "Hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish. We're trying to set up a solution." They put some more advanced technical support in place and were able to solve it in under 24 hours. That helped us in initially setting up the solution.

Our previous solution was 1U Dell EMC equipment. We were buying new equipment. we were also buying the 1U servers from HPE. But we needed a solution which had flexibility.

The initial setup was complex. We had a couple of bright engineers working on it, and they figured out a lot of things that they don't know. They don't always have experience around certain platforms. The problem was that they couldn't find documentation easily, to walk them through setup when they just didn't know the platform.

We used a reseller, TIG. Our experience with them was great. They facilitated getting us pretty much all the information we needed.

We have seen ROI. Building it to be so powerful, we had six racks of 1 to 2U servers of Dell EMC equipment spread out throughout the data center - six racks of gear. We were able to condense down into four blades, because they are so powerful. That's a huge ROI and savings for us.

It has also reduced our cost of operations. We have fewer teams focusing on the overall solution. We have a team of two right now, compared to the team of six or seven people assigned to the whole cloud solution in the past. From an operations perspective, we're probably saving a good $150,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs, cutting out those racks. A rack costs me the square footage. Also, if I'm using a rack for my cloud, I can't sell it to a client. Moving six racks into one has saved me a ton of overhead on the infrastructure side.

In terms of TCO, I think we'll get there faster. While the blade is more expensive than a 1U-server - I'm going to buy a 1U server for $10,000 and it's going to support X number of clients - ultimately we get to the TCO faster because we're able to pack more into the density. That means our price per gig can be lower, but we make more margin on it, overall. We're able to get to that TCO faster because of the density that Synergy provides.

VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now.

We vetted out everything under the sun from the UCS side, the Cisco side, the Dell EMC side. They had new chassis coming out, chassis which hadn't been released yet, which they were showing me. 

We really landed on Synergy because it was the most flexible out of all the solutions. We were able to get the power we were looking for in the chassis. Our data center is really built on density. We can run 52 kW in a rack, but with all the other platforms we were limited on the amount of power we could push in there. We liked Synergy because we could put four chassis in, running two 8280 processors, and running 1.5 to 3 terabytes of RAM per blade, making it a super powerful, 42 to 50 kW cabinet. We couldn't do that with any other platform.

Most of the time, people look at our solution - the way we built Synergy - and they say, "Man, we don't need that much power. You built it with the highest processors you can buy, the most RAM you can put in there." I tell them it doesn't really matter, from a Synergy perspective, if you need a smaller solution, less RAM. Synergy is a good play for them, even though they don't need the powerhouse, because Synergy is a platform is solid. They could get gold processors, lower processors, put 512 of RAM in it, and the TCO for them would still be as good as we're getting.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the solution is that we should have gotten on it sooner. That is the main one. We weren't focusing heavily on our density before. Now we are. The thing we've learned is that for every new solution, whether it's storage or networking or whatever it is, we need to focus on the density side of things.

We did a big vetting of HPE's Pointnext services which helps move to the solution. We spent a ton of time on it because we really wanted to make it work. Unfortunately, since we're a service provider, the model didn't work for us, but we may use it for storage, so it could work out.

What does it not have? That's the harder question. Right now, it has everything we need. We don't really see anything, it doesn't have.

I'd rate Synergy a nine out of ten because, after it was done, it was almost perfect. It was getting it done, at the beginning, that was our biggest struggle.

HPE Synergy could improve its remote support.

I have been familiar with HPE Synergy for approximately 10 years.

HPE Synergy is a stable solution.

The scalability of HPE Synergy is good.

The support is good they have helped us.

I have used Lenovo and they have large servers and are easy to support.

The deployment of HPE Synergy is easy and takes approximately three to four hours.

My advice to others is this solution is easy to deploy.

I rate HPE Synergy an eight out of ten.

It's a little bit more complex than Blade Enclosure. It's like any virtual environment, probably. If you have virtualization on the top of the Synergy Frame, it works well.

I didn't see a lot of valuable features with Synergy. The Blade Enclosure was easier to use. They have complicated things with Synergy. The only good thing is that they have some powerful machines that you can use, such as the latest generations of HPE Compute that you can use. That's the only advantage.

It's a pretty complex solution.

The continuous update of the firmware and the patch updates and security updates for the hardware make it continuously complex. It all comes back to complexity. I don't have any other concerns. It's all about how complex the component is.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years.

There is no problem with the scalability. We haven't had issues. It can scale as needed. 

The HPE tech support is okay. It's only that you need to push them a bit so that you can get the right person. Sometimes they just give you someone that really is learning with you, which is not good. However, if you push it a little bit, then you get the right person.

We're customers and end-users.

We are an HPE shop in terms of blade technology. In terms of the computer, we are an HPE shop. So, we are with the Blade Enclosure and with the Synergy Frame. We use both.

We're just using HPE OneView with the Blade Enclosure and with the Synergy Frame. We are a very small shop. We are moving mainly to the cloud. So, everything we do is more in the cloud. On-prem we are a very small shop.

If you are okay to keep going with the Blade Enclosure (as the Blade Enclosure is not going to expire for quite a while) I would advise a user to compare a few other things before going with Synergy. For me, it wasn't a good experience.

I'd rate the solution a six out of ten.