HPE Synergy Reviews

We have built our on-premises private cloud on top of HPE Synergy connected to 3PAR SAN storage. Our cloud was built above Hyper-V hypervisor, and that's the computing node of it.

For me, this is the best frame server technology available in the market. We can compare it to Cisco UCS. 

It is robust and stable, and it is also easy to deploy and scale. Their support is the best.

ICMs could be better in this model. When you look at its competitors, the most critical point is the throughput. HPE is the best with the ICM module, which is an interconnect module that connects the servers of the frames to the LAN and SAN. 

HPE Synergy should also support the latest processors provided by Intel.

I have been using this solution for three to four years.

It is very stable.

We didn't run it on a massive scale. We have 60 computing nodes on an eight-blades enclosure. We didn't face any issue so far.

I am not sure about the number of users, but in terms of frames, it is 200K or 200,000. We are happy with this solution. When we need more computing nodes, we will add them as HPE Synergy.

Their support is one of the best ones currently available.

Its initial setup is very easy.

We are satisfied with its price. 

My experience with them is on-premises, and it has been an outstanding experience. We are happy with HPE Synergy, and we will keep on using it. 

I would rate HPE Synergy an eight out of ten.

Virtualization is our primary use case.

The deployment time has been decreased a lot. There are fewer things to configure and that increases productivity and provides time to work on different things. Fewer resources are required and it requires less of my time. 

In terms of the productivity of our deployment team, the amount of time has been decreased a lot. In the past, to deploy one c7000 chassis with 15 or 16 blades, we literally used to spend two to three weeks. But with a Synergy, it's very quick. Within three days we can do the deployment.

Because we are bringing in and deploying things very quickly, we can go to the business and give them solutions pretty quickly. It helps us to implement new business requirements quickly.

Moreover, the number of support issues with this particular Synergy environment is way less than with c7000 so I'm very happy with that. I'm not opening as many support tickets as with the c7000. That's where it's great for our whole team.

With the decrease in support issues, there has been a decrease in our cost of operations.

The ease of deployment is the first thing that comes to mind.

I would definitely like to see them fix the firmware updates on all the blades. No matter what operating system it is running on, make sure I can do the firmware as well as the software for those firmware components at the same time. I don't want to have to rely on an external product. Let's bring that product inside the menu so that I have a better experience with updates. Firmware is a very big thing.

I would also like them to bring management of all the Synergy equipment into a single management interface, no matter where they're located.

2 years

No major outages. We have had a few small issues here and there but that's about it.

We are hitting our third Synergy rack and we are buying the fourth. You can go well with it until seven. After seven, you probably need to put another management ring in there. Other than that, it can scale and work exceptionally well.

We have gotten some very good technical support from a few guys. I even have their names. Whenever we call them, we generally get support from those two or three guys and we are happy with them.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of business requirements. When the business feels that we are a little bit late or declining, that's when we need to look into different solutions and price.

The initial setup is straightforward. I worked on it a lot for one year. Synergy is a little bit different, but I got enough training initially. In addition, HPE deployment guys were there for the initial setup. Later I did it myself.

We did it for ourselves.

ROI has been pretty good, although we're still investing a lot.

We also shortlisted Cisco and Dell. We went with HPE because we are pretty comfortable with it. The price was also competitive enough to beat them.

Look into Synergy. It's a pretty decent a product at the enterprise scale. It has all the capabilities. 

The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is that the product is really good. When we see the next iteration of the product, and that the company does a very good job of fixing issues, we really like it. That's what happened when we upgraded from c7000 to Synergy.

I would give the product about an eight out of ten. The product is pretty rock-solid. There are small issues here and there. But it has helped me to decrease my deployment time, and the number of support calls and time spent on support have been decreased a lot compared to c7000 and the issues that we were seeing with that. That's why I like it.

We use this solution to run both our production and non-production environments. We currently do not have any cloud initiatives, but we bought it so that we can be future protected for the cloud.

Where it used to take one week to re-image or upgrade our hosts, it can now take one day.

This solution helps us with new business requirements because we have the ability to expand or add more frames, depending on the requests from the business process.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of deploying servers, profiles, and images.

Having that single pane of glass is a good feature for the management of our environment.

The vendor needs to focus on the features that are already included and make them better.

The installation and initial setup process is complex and needs to be improved.

Once this solution is implemented, it is very stable.

One of the reasons we chose this solution is because it's highly scalable.

I don't think that the technical support for the product is there yet. I think that they're building up people to that novel technology, but there's very limited knowledge at the first and second level of support for this product.

The initial setup of this solution is complex. The interconnects would not connect and nobody knew why. It took at least forty days to complete.

We used an integrator for our deployment. We felt that they lacked in-depth knowledge of the product. They knew the service stuff, but if something went wrong then they didn't really know how to bring it back online.

I would say that we haven't seen ROI yet, but it was a way to get off of our old chassis and we had to start fresh. I would say that we will have our savings by year five.

This solution has decreased our deployment time by approximately sixty-five percent.

My advice is that if you're looking for a product that helps you save time when deploying your hosts, then this is the perfect solution. It is flexible and can handle many different workloads.

The biggest thing that I have learned from using this solution is to be patient. Once it's up and running it's great.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Synergy for VMware and some physical servers.

There is no comparison between installing a server by hand versus having everything automated in place. That makes a big difference. By automating we can avert human errors. Life becomes easier and operations become much easier.

It helps us manage our IT landscape by reducing the amount of manual work we have to do.

In terms of implementing new business requirements quickly, so far my exposure to Synergy is the fact that we can automate everything. We can easily spin up a new virtual machine and scale up our capacity for VMware. If we need to scale out or scale up an application we can do it very easily. We can have the VMware infrastructure ready in no time.

Overall, it has made us more efficient. On the infrastructure side, we have more control over the firmware and how we are managing our physical servers.

Synergy has also decreased our deployment time and reduced our cost of operations.

• It provides us with automation at the hardware level. 
• Coordination through HPE OneView is great.

I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version. The backward compatibility is there, but if we need to spend time testing the code frequently, it will make our lives difficult, and we might lose some production cycles.

It's pretty stable. We wouldn't have bought it otherwise.

It's scalable.

I don't have any experience with HPE technical support.

If someone is looking at HPE Synergy, c7000, or Cisco UCS, Synergy is worth a shot because it provides a lot of flexibility and automation. It can make the lives of operations team members, or whoever is managing the hardware, much better due to the automation. The biggest thing that I like about Synergy is the automation.

Compared to the other product that I have used, I would rate Synergy at eight out of ten. This is a cool platform. Compared to UCS this is a little better, more user-friendly.

We do a lot with ESX and virtualization of workloads.

It streamlines network connectivity, fibre connectivity. It's made it all very simple, very easy. Once you get it set up, it's ready to go.

In terms of implementing new business requirements quickly, it helps with time to deployment. We bring a new server online and, within a few hours, we have it up and running and in production. It's absolutely decreased our deployment time by four or five hours per server.

Synergy helps with the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams because I don't have to have the network guy do something for a new piece of hardware. Instead, I'm able to provision dynamically.

From a switch-port count and a fibre-port count point of view, it has definitely reduced our IT infrastructure costs.

Cable management is a big feature, in addition to time to deployment. We can buy a new server and have it up and running very quickly.

For managing our IT landscape I'm able to go into the profiles and the automating of firmware management across multiples nodes, and I am able to orchestrate all that with OneView.

I would really like a way to validate the firmware in my specific environment before trying to deploy it. Those were the issues we had early on with firmware upgrades, particularly around certificates. All in all, having some level of confidence aside from it just having been tested generically would help. Something more specific to my environment would be very helpful.

There is room for improvement in the speed; that would be the biggest thing. The time to deploy firmware... Everything takes a really long time. Having that all sped up would be nice. The 4.2 firmware release has helped tremendously with that. From my side, I see about a 30 percent improvement in speed already.

The solution is very stable. Early on we had firmware issues but those have gone away. It's moving forward very nicely.

The scalability of the solution is excellent.

Technical support has been good. Early on - we were more of an early adopter - there were some issues with support. Lately, support has been fantastic.

We were using straight DL380s before. In my previous life I used the c7000. The c7000 timeframe was up. We needed more density and fewer cables. It really wasn't too hard a decision.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We used a VAR for the initial deployment. Our experience with them was excellent. They knew the product. They had set it up before; it was very obvious. Their pre-planning was top-notch. We were very happy with them.

For the second deployment we did not use a third-party, we did that all in-house.

We really didn't have a shortlist. We are an HPE shop from start to end.

I am very happy with the solution. I have no major complaints. Support is what I expect from HPE support when it comes to these products. It has simplified our operations. I don't honestly know if it's reduced costs. It probably hasn't as of yet, as we're not full.

We're not so much using it for hybrid cloud at the moment. We're using it more for day-to-day operations. We used HPE's Education Services to move to the solution.

I would rate Synergy at nine out of ten. Everything has room for improvement. This is a robust, stable, scalable solution. I have no major complaints at this time.

We use it for our infrastructure. We have multiple servers, therefore we use it as our main infrastructure for applications to host our servers.

We don't have a hybrid cloud environment. We use on-premise.

It has made our IT infrastructure teams more efficient. Previously, we had a standard infrastructure, which was compute, power, and storage. They had to run from one place to another to create a virtual machine. Now they can do everything in one shot.

In our old infrastructure, we had very high I/Os. Now, with Synergy, this has been reduced.

The newer technology is driving business and easing the administration process.

Synergy is a composable infrastructure. To have the ability to create:

• Workloads
• Power
• Compute
• Storage.

This is what drew us to Synergy.

With OneView, we can take care of all our servers in one dashboard.

It is very stable. We never had any issues with it.

It is highly scalable.

I have not used the technical support because I haven't had any issues.

Our infrastructure was very old. We had a lot of high I/Os. It was taking us a long time to create servers, etc. We knew that we had to change.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took us around six hours to set it up. There were no complications at all, because Synergy comes as a box. You don't have to do anything. You just have plug it into the network, and that is it. It's done.

We used a reseller, KDCC, for the deployment. They was great.

We used HPE’s Pointnext services to help move to this solution. They were great. The Professional Services of HPE were great. They came and set it up, making it an easy process.

We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 70 percent.

It costs us around $60,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent.

We looked at Dell EMC, VCE, and HPE. We went with the newest technology, which was composable infrastructure. The others were just hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would recommend the product. My team is very happy with the way the product is right now. It is an excellent product. We hadn't any issues with it.

• 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.

Moving virtual machines over to Synergy.

In a hybrid cloud environment, the solution enables us to do SQL. We are able to move it up and take it down.

Storage-wise, I don't have to order more storage. It is so modular that I can pick and add what I need.

The solution helps to manage our IT landscape by allocating more servers.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. We are installing weight scales across the state. We can bring up machine per weigh station quickly.

When our development team requests servers or services, we are able to bring it up. The return time of bringing up a virtual machine hardware is now quicker.

It has a modular design. We are able to add more to it when needed.

It is really easy to use, because it's GUI-based. It is not command line based, like mainframes.

There are some functions which are not clear cut.

Instead of having Synergy vertical, make it horizontal. It is easier to stick in when it is vertical.

So far, it has been really stable for three years.

The scalability is good. We were trying to order another system to be able to install at the state data center, and it was very scalable. 

I haven't had to talk to technical support yet.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed in-house.

We have not seen ROI.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure costs. 

I would go with Synergy. It is better than the Nutanix solution. Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy.

Go with what is comfortable for the employees. We were using HPE for some time, then we switched off of it for some time. After switching back, our employees adapted to it quickly, because it was easy to use.

I wasn't here when they began installing it, so I can't tell what the deployment time was before. Over time as the teams get used to it, the return time is now two to three hours.