HPE Synergy Reviews

The primary use case is virtual machines. We run VMware on them and virtual servers, so applications, web servers, and things of that nature.

The solution enables us to run VDI, backups, and web platforms for our organization in a hybrid cloud environment.

It makes life easier for us when we are deploying new technology, as we have the building blocks already in place.

It will put everything all under one umbrella, when we get to the point where the majority of our systems are all on Synergy. At this point, we are only 16 or 18 frames in. However, once we get everything onto the Synergy platform, they will all be manageable under one umbrella, and it will all be standard infrastructure.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. This is primarily from the standpoint of being able to deploy new servers and machines. As requests come in, we can turn them around within a matter of a day or two because we already have the building blocks in place.

We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two.

It would be nice if the OneView umbrella could truly be one view and cover everything. Synergy has its own version of OneView. ProLiant Servers have their own version of OneView, so it truly isn't one view. We also have other platforms within HPE that aren't covered by OneView at all. We have many views instead of one view, and it would be nice if that could be resolved. That would help us a lot.

The timeliness of updates, firmware, and things of that nature needs improvement, as far as what we have to apply, and when, being able to maintain a consistent load on each one of our frames.

The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back.

We still have some questions regarding the stability of the platform.

The scalability is very good.

From a technical support standpoint, it seems as though the platform came out more quickly than the technical support behind it did. It is much easier to find good tech support people from HPE on the older product line as opposed to Synergy. Synergy is a bit more limited.

We came from a blade environment. Now, we are on Synergy. It is a continuation of a product line that we have been using for well over a decade, and it is just familiar territory.

We were already heavily into c7000 blades. Synergy is a continuation from c7000s. From our standpoint, at least from the server standpoint, the functions are basically the same. 

The c7000 blade is retiring. Synergy is the next iteration of blade servers. Synergy is the next rendition of this type of platform, and it felt like a logical fit for us to move in this direction.

We are able to deploy much more quickly than if we were running physical equipment or rack servers.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. It was just the basics that we would have expected in using a product that we were already familiar with in OneView.

We did use HPE’s Pointnext services, and our experience was okay.

We used both a reseller and HPE for our deployment. 

If I look back at the days when we were deploying physical equipment or just rack mount equipment, as needed, the product has saved us weeks.

It's a relatively new investment. If anything, it has increased our costs at this point.

We have a long standing relationship with HPE, between the technology, pricing, and so on. It was a good fit.

The HPE Synergy is a good platform, but they need to look at management and updates to make sure that they know what they are getting into.

HPE continues to make a good product. There is no doubt about that. It is a possibility that we could have jumped into this a little too early. It would have been nicer if it where a more mature product when we jumped in. Sometimes waiting a bit can be beneficial.

It increases the throughput. We had a problem with the C7000 with the down-link speed to the individual blades and what the up-link speeds were. Memory was kind of a constraint problem for us.

Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us.

One of the bigger changes is in that larger form size, we can get more things in the individual blades. We can also deal with higher thermals on the CPUs, which are all kind of significant.

We're still testing the storage device to see exactly if that's going to be useful for us or not.

The idea of taking 3PAR and directly attaching it could be compelling for us. We just have a few more things that we need to test out to see if they got fixed from the beta process.

It's mainly the fact that it gives us the next generation of the C7000, which we've been using since 2009. That gets us in that same useful pattern. The concept of virtual connect, OneView, is compelling. It extends our existing operational knowledge and gives us a longer run life with that kind of pattern. It still solves my issue with cabling and power in the data centers. It is using newer technologies which solve the issues we had with the C7000s.

One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput.

What they're coming out with initially on the road map is a 40 Gig up-link on virtual connect. That would be one of the things that we'd like. Other things that would be useful for us would be adding an AMD CPU to their product line in the 2018 time-frame.

We are currently testing stability. The beta system had some issues. They were supposed to fix them as they came up in production and we'll confirm that when we get to it.

In terms of scalability, we're happy with it in general. We look forward to what we can do with it. We believe that it should be able to replace what we've been doing with the C7000s. It mechanically would reduce the number of C7000s that we'd be running. Because we're growing, we still need to add enclosures.

We have used HPE technical support for this solution in the beta process. We were heavily tied into that. They were great. Some of the bugs that they fixed led us to another bug. But when talking to the product manager, everything that we identified as a bug has now been fixed in the GA product. We'll just confirm this later.

Before Synergy, we were using C7000s. We knew that the road map of that new technology coming in the C7000 was coming to an end.

If you're going to buy that new capacity and you're not going to fully populate the enclosures, then you need to move off C7000 and go to Synergy.

When selecting a vendor, I look for operational stability. One of the things that drove us to stay on HPE, as opposed to Cisco UCS, was the fact that UCS basically stops at the hyper-visor. HPE actually goes all the way up to the OS and beyond. If you have an issue with SQL, you can get help from HPE. You can't really get help from Cisco.

The initial setup, because it was still in beta, was complex. We discovered several bugs in the networking and bugs in the way some of the iLO functions worked. We were one of the more prolific groups in the beta program. Those issues should be fixed and we'll confirm that later.

Think about where you want to be in five years and choose the products in the Synergy family that will help you get to that point. You have a lot of options and if you just buy what is cost effective today, you may find yourself in trouble five years from now.

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.

We're using Synergy primarily as a replacement for our C7000 Blade servers, which are going out-of-life.

We use VMware ESX across all of our Synergy nodes. On top of that, we have a mixture of workloads from web servers, application servers, and Microsoft SQL databases.

Using this solution has allowed me to devote more time to other tasks since the administration is so easy.

Our business needs are somewhat static, so we do not often have to implement new business requirements. However, when we have had to spin things up quickly, we were able to do that in this environment.

This solution has greatly increased the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams. We have fewer administrators working on the infrastructure, and we’ve now been able to transition a number of those people into DevOps roles.

This solution has decreased our deployment time, although I cannot give exact figures. I can say that we’ve been able to implement the Blue-Green Methodology as a result of the increased capacity that we have in the Synergy environment.

Using Synergy has reduced our cost of operations because it allows more dense placement of the virtual machines than our previous solution.

The most valuable features of this solution are the ease of management and the integration with OneView. The ease that we can allocate servers during busy times helps us to manage our IT landscape.

A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution.

I would like to see an increased variety of uplink options in the Virtual Connects.

The inclusion of these features would allow us to more easily grow our network infrastructure and accommodate future growth.

There are improvements that can be made in the area of OneView integrations and firmware, with respect to how the proper firmware versions are matched to the OneView installation that you have. 

This solution has been quite stable for us, so far. There have been a number of updates and the product is still going through a maturity cycle, so I expect that the stability will continue.

For the most part, our developers are not aware of the underlying infrastructure on which they're doing the work, but that’s probably a good thing because if they were aware then it may be for bad reasons. We’ve had a lot of success with continuous uptime on these boxes, so it’s not really noticed by our developers.

One of the reasons that we purchased Synergy is that it's easily scalable.

Technical support has been a bit of a mixed bag. When we've had issues, we've called in and sometimes it's taken a while to get to a resolution. Generally, I would say that I'm satisfied with technical support.

We have used the HPE PointNext services, and they are very knowledgeable engineers.

We were using C7000 Enclosures and some Rack Mount servers. Our existing C7000 Blade Chassis Enclosure was performing well, but it is going end-of-support so we needed something new. We did an evaluation of Synergy and we found that it fit our needs.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We used a value-added reseller and hired the HPE installation services to come with the solution. They assisted us with setting it up, and the experience was quite good.

We have seen ROI, although I do not have datapoints that I can share.

We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on. This is in addition to the VMware and Microsoft licensing for the operating systems.

Our IT infrastructure costs have not been affected by this solution. Most of our infrastructure surrounding and supporting Synergy was already purchased prior to it being set up.

We did not look outside of HPE, as we're exclusively an HPE shop on the compute side. We looked at the available offerings and wanted to make sure that they fit our needs through a proof of concept.

Synergy is definitely a solution that I would recommend for forward-thinking IT shops.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is to make sure that you do all of the available training sessions on the new technology.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it primarily for hypervisors at the moment. We're looking at expanding into VDI, but it's primarily for hypervisors.

It gives us a lot more flexibility for spinning up new hypervisors, compared to the c7000. We use the VMM tie-in. There's a VMM OneView plugin that works really well. We do one-touch deployment for our new hypervisors.

It helps us implement new business requirements quickly. If we needed to, we could spin up a number of hypervisors pretty easily.

In terms of the efficiency of our IT infrastructure, the capacity is pretty nice. The density that we get out of it is really nice. It's a regular chassis and the blades go up to about 1.5 terabytes or so. We fill them with a terabyte. We went from two c7000s, fully-populated, to one Synergy frame, half-populated. It frees up a lot of space.

It has also decreased our deployment time. When we stood up the hypervisors from images, it probably took us about three or four hours per hypervisor. With the VMM plugin that we have with it, all four of the new hypervisors we just deployed were done in about 30 to 45 minutes. As for our cost of operations, it has reduced our power consumption, at the very least. It has also reduced the time that we would put into a c7000.

It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes.

The networking is so easy. We came from c7000s and we had to deal a lot with Virtual Connect. The new networking stuff, the new OneView solution for Synergy, is probably the best part about it. We haven't upgraded it yet, but we're looking forward to updating it and seeing how easy that is compared to the c7000.

I would like the ability to have my storage components accessed from any other frame across the backplane. If we have a storage module and we run out of space in that frame, it'd be nice to be able to share it across the frames. You can do it with hyperconverged. Why can't you do it with Synergy?

The stability is pretty good. We had a DIMM fail from ECC memory. We didn't have any outage. It just isolated it off to the side. We have the remote support set up so they opened a ticket and had a guy out to us at 7:00 in the morning.

The scalability is pretty good. I think you can take it up to something like 21 frames if you really want to. We'll never have a use for that, but it seems pretty good.

Technical support was a little busy the last couple times I've had to contact them. It was a new product. Support wasn't bad, it was just a little slow.

Our c7000s were getting old, end-of-life, and we wanted to condense. We freed up a lot of space in our data centers lately, and that was part of it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. There's a learning curve to it, just like there is with anything else. There are "ifs," "and's," and "but's," but they cabled it up for us. It was pretty straightforward after that.

We bought it through our VAR, American Digital. But most of the people who came out were from HPE directly.

We haven't really computed ROI. It was more of a lifecycle replacement that we came across.

After buying it, I don't think there are any costs other than for regular support.

We looked a little bit at Nutanix. We looked at the Cisco UCS chassis too. We went with HPE mostly due to the fact that we're already an HPE shop. We already had OneView. We were pretty happy with the c7000s. They were always solid. Synergy seemed pretty mature. I'm not a huge fan of some of the marketing around it. It works very well for what it does. They try and build it up to be things that it's not, for most people.

It's a pretty good solution depending on what your use case for it is. If you're looking for a blade system, you're looking for density, and you're looking for something that's going to be easy for your guys to spin up and get going, have a look at Synergy.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to double-check the cables that your VAR orders for you, before the product arrives. Other than that, we've been happy with the product overall. It's one of those things where when it works, it works, and there are no complaints.

I give Synergy a nine out of ten. It works really well. We've had good results with it. The only problem is, as I said, the storage module doesn't share across the frames.

It is where we do most of our compute for the various different things for our homegrown software that we developed and use. We also use the product for a third-party software that we do, using cloud-based services. 

In a hybrid cloud environment, the solution enables us to a lot of databases, then different homegrown in-house developed stuff that we use for media servers and compression servers. We can also do management for workforces and optimization for workforces, in terms of the products that we provide.

We can get more density in the same physical footprint out of it, which has to do more with the density of the blades that go into the Synergy frames, because you can get less blades than you could with the old c7000s. There are just more cores and sockets with more memory available, so you can get denser with your applications. 

We build out a whole stack at one time, so we don't have to worry about it until that stack is full, then that gives us time to get the next one ready.

You don't have to have networking in every single frame, just have the interconnects. You don't have the traditional A and B side in the sort of multiple LAG groups, and so you really can sustain a lot of loss. The other side of that is if you need to sort of push more bandwidth up, you can do it because of the interconnects in the networking, and the same goes for Fibre Channel as well.

The speed in OneView and how it updates the entire configuration needs improvement. If they can do that, and it could be a little more clear on what impact different actions will have for certain things, that would be good. They do give warnings for certain things, but there are other things where they don't really give you a warning, then you do it and it will be rebooting something like the host (or whatever). If that is in a production environment, that is really dangerous. This is our pain point.

We haven't really had any problems once it was set up. The initial installation can sometimes be problematic.

We have had some weird issues with the networking and interfaces. We had an interface where if it was the first interface to join a LAG group it wouldn't come up, but if it joined second, third, or fourth, then it worked fine. We still haven't figured that one out.

The amount of time that it takes to update the entire configuration because it has to go and update so much stuff: It takes quite a long time. Then, the potential for downtime when you do that is also problematic, especially if you don't have a full three or five frame set that you are working with. If you are going from one frame to two frames or two frames to three frames there is a potential for downtime there. So, we have opted to go to full stacks when we implement them.

It is scalable. You can manage with OneView multiple frame sets. We have chosen not to do that right now, but I can see where, as we get bigger, we'll want to implement that and maybe change the frame link up a bit so we can do that. However, we haven't done that right now.

The technical support was pretty good. They were good to very good, depending on the issue.

We had the c7000, and there wasn't anything new. We needed to move forward, so we could have a platform that we could rely on for the next ten or so years. Something that we could go and deploy, taking advantage of all the functions that it has.

The initial setup was definitely different from what we were used to, so there was a learning curve. However, the more experience that we gain with it, the easier that it becomes. Every implementation has been sort of faster and easier than the previous one. We are to the point now where it is pretty straightforward for us.

We used startup services for the deployment. The frustration with that was it was contracted out to third-party vendors, so it was sort of hit or miss for what you get with third-party vendors in terms of their knowledge. That was a bit frustrating. 

We will probably always buy the startup services. However, we will do the rack and stack along with most of the wiring in terms of the network and Fibre Channel. Then, we will let them run the interconnects through the actual configuration of the enclosure itself with the startup services links.

We did look at Cisco UCS only because we thought it might be a good time to change things up, but we are really an HPE shop.

Make sure that it will work for you, your environment, what you have in mind, and what you want to accomplish. If you have a lot of small points of presents which are located around the world, this may not the best solution. However, if you are in a big data center or colocated data center, and you will be doing a lot of deployments, then I think this is a good solution.

Right now, we are mostly configuring profiles, the configuration of the frame sets, and the logical enclosure groups manually. We are moving towards having Synergy help us manage our IT landscape. That is what we are trying to get to next.

We are not using it as a fully composable infrastructure because we have storage outside of Synergy. It is sort of a hybrid of what we were doing before and what composable infrastructure really is, so that is where we are at.

It hasn't decreased our deployment time yet, but it can potentially in the future. We are trying to get not only to servers that we deploy, but the infrastructure that deploys the servers. We want to get to the point where that is all configured and deployed using infrastructure as code. We are a long ways from that, but that is where we want to get, and hopefully, we will get there.

It was the next generation of what was possible versus the old stuff where it was very confined to one frame versus multiple frames or you could make it composable and move workloads around easier.

We don't really have Synergy for our development environment.

Biggest lesson learnt: Pay attention to the nuances it. Take advantage of all the stuff which is built into the system. A lot of times, we buy technology and only use one part of it. If you use sort of the whole suite, then it works better. 

The primary use case is for processing our analytics platform. The solution enables us to do all of our analytic workflows in a hybrid cloud environment.

The processing time has been about 50 times faster and allows us to do AI models.

The solution has helped us implement new business requirements quickly with new audience requests because Synergy's compute power when combined with 3PAR has been really terrific.

We have had very low infrastructure requirements because of its simple setup. It has helped us dramatically improve our SLAs.

The manageability is its most valuable feature. It is a fully managed platform, which is very simple to manage. It lets us set up servers quickly.

It allows us to have better throughput.

I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure.

Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent.

So far, it has been very stable. We've only had to reboot it once.

We like the scalability. being able to drop new nodes into the rack.

The technical support has been very good. 

Our old solution was too slow, and we were at risk of losing client jobs.

I would have purchased the product sooner, but it didn't exist.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there.

We used an HPE partner for the deployment. They were terrific.

We have absolutely seen ROI: The number of jobs processed and being able to process jobs within the allotted time frame, so we have not lost any jobs. Thus, the solution has certainly paid for itself.

The solution decreased our deployment time. It only took 10 percent of the time.

We outright purchased Synergy. 

Our TCO has been affected by five percent.

HPE and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We chose HPE Synergy because it was the superior solution.

It handles everything that we are looking to do.

Consider using it in conjunction with Nimble.

Biggest lesson learned: Be more on top of what HPE products and solutions are available.

It's an HCI solution. I've also used it for on-prem and GreenLake solutions for consumption model requirements.

It's typically for enterprise solutions that are multi-data centers and multi-sites. There are several Synergy frames.

The hyper-converged infrastructure where everything is stateless is valuable. Basically, you have your compute storage and networking management.

Gen 11 is being released. That's going to have a lot of advantages over Gen 10 and previous generations in terms of the cooling modules in the servers to keep them cooler and run with more efficiency and better performance. There are more management features with iLO 6 and the latest OneView management.

In terms of additional features, I've been requesting SimpliVity to be running on a compute module versus a 1U and 2U.

I've been using it since the C7000 in 2019. 

We've seen an ROI.

It's easier to consolidate standard tier-three infrastructure into an HCI solution.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.