HPE Synergy Reviews

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 use it for our analytics platform.

We're able to support the placement of devices a lot more quickly.

It helps us manage our IT landscape because it's very scalable, so we can add nodes as we need to.

When it comes to implementing new business requirements quickly, the solution is helpful. We had to build out a topology to support new software that we're running. We were able to just drop it in and, within a week, we were up and running.

It has also had a positive effect on the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team. The manageability of it is so easy, we're able to install it quickly, and replacement parts are easy to get in and out quickly.

Synergy has decreased deployment time. We have gone from about a week down to two days.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its manageability.

I would like to see more nodes in a single chassis so we wouldn't have to purchase additional chassis.

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it so far.

The scalability of the solution is similar to the previous c7000.

We haven't had to open a case with technical support, which is great.

We used HPE's c7000 previously. The switch was a customer-driven decision.

The setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller. We've always worked with Comport and they're a great partner.

We were able to reduce our turnaround time on some of our projects, from upwards of three or four days down to a couple of hours.

The solution hasn't reduced our cost of operations or IT infrastructure cost. Our TCO is about the same.

We didn't look at any other vendors for this solution.

Definitely look into it. It's a great solution. Do your research to make sure that it's for you.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that HPE builds great solutions in blade infrastructure.

I would rate Synergy an eight out of ten, mostly because of the reduction in the number of nodes.

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 mission-critical applications and mission-critical databases. An example is that we host development servers on it.

In terms of managing our IT landscape, the solution helps us allocate more servers when needed, within the cluster.

Synergy also helps us implement new business requirements quickly. We needed a new VMware cluster for a particular application. We were able to throw those Synergy hosts in there and create it really quickly for QRadar, and attach a lot of storage to it.

It's something that is easy to implement and get moving on and I don't have to worry about anything else.

• Dependability
• Reliability
• The ease of managing the system

One of the features I want to see, which I will see with OneView 5.0, is to have all the OneView consoles in a single pane of glass. That will make it easy to see everything in one place and not have to log in to multiple consoles.

The stability is great.

The scalability is very good. It's easy to scale out: Throw a blade in there and apply a profile to it and move on.

Technical support is great. HPE has always had great technical support.

We were running out of resources and some of our hardware was getting old and needed to be replaced. We used Cisco UCS and we still use it. We purchased both of them to leverage out our resources with our different vendors.

The initial setup was a little complex because it was a new system for us; different than the c7000 enclosures that we used before.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was very good.

We can put a bigger workload on there because the systems can produce a lot more resources now. I would say it has reduced our cost of operations; I couldn't imagine it doesn't. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure costs, although I don't deal much with the cost side of things.

I can't say that I had a shortlist because I've only got two vendors that I use: Cisco and HPE.

Do your research but evaluate this system.

I rate it an eight out of ten because there's no perfect system. Ten is perfect but every system has its little glitches.

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.

The primary use case is VMware hosts. Since most of our environment is virtualized, it is our primary compute.

We have nine c7000 enclosures, and even with Virtual Enterprise Connect Manager, I would sometimes have to go on each enclosure to make changes. I have not run into a situation yet where I cannot manage all of the Synergy enclosures from OneView.

We have seen an improvement in the efficiency of our IT infrastructure. It is faster to do firmware upgrades through the deployment of new bladed servers.

I like the OneView management. It is much better than the old management for the c7000 enclosures, which is what Synergy replaces. It is a big step up, and it is much easier to use and quicker.

Synergy is much easier to use, which is saving us time. We are able to set the profiles for firmware upgrades. This makes the process for the care and feeding of the IT environment much simpler, quicker, and cleaner.

The setup experience needed some improvement.

So far, it has been very stable. However, it is a small sample size.

It seems to scale nice. We're going to eventually replace all of our c7000 enclosures, but we're not going to end up having nine Synergy enclosures because we're going to gain so much better density. That is a big selling point. With the Gen 10 Blades, we can easily do a 3:1 consolidation, which will help us out a lot down the road.

The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up. We had some requirements from our information security department, and technical support wasn't able to give me immediate answers. They had to engage engineering, which they did, then they got me the answers. However, it took a week of back and forth conversations and phone calls to get it all worked out. It got done, which was good.

I don't remember if our c7000 enclosures are end-of-sale yet, but it is pretty close. So, they got to go.

The complexity of the setup was medium, but it was good. We didn't have to map things out. It was still faster than setting up what would have been with the c7000s, but it wasn't just a drop in, turn it on, and it worked. We had to configure the composer, figure out all our networks, and things like that. We had to do some network configuration, but there were white papers for all that. So, the setup was medium, and we were able to get through it pretty much ourselves with the help of AdvizeX.

We did a remote install, then we engaged a third-party partner of HPE (AdvizeX) to help us with the configuration. They were very good.

It makes our deployment time go faster, decreasing the process time by half. The big time savings are on the upgrade process. That is much faster. For example, last time that we upgraded the c7000 enclosure's firmware levels for the OAs and interconnects, it was effectively 40 man-hours worth of effort. With Synergy in OneView, it was easily a quarter of that. It was such a better experience.

We stood up 11 Gen 10 Synergy blades, which ended up replacing approximately 25 Gen 7 c7000 blades. So, you're looking at a 2:1 consolidation in hardware. We're expecting that as the Gen 8s age out, we're going to do the exact same thing, and we will be more aggressive there, where we are looking at a 3:1 consolidation. Managing fewer servers will save a lot of time and effort, along with having everything in OneView.

We have looked at Dell EMC MX7000 offering. In the interest of time and familiarity, we stuck with HPE. Bring in an entire new set of hardware infrastructure was not a good idea. There would be too many moving pieces, and we wanted to stick with something we knew. We have Gen9s in the c7000s, and we will eventually put them all into OneView. If we bring in Dell EMC, we now have two management platforms operating side-by-side, which is not a good idea.

I prefer OneView a lot to the Enterprise Manager on the c7000s. It is so much cleaner and a lot better.

Keep in mind, because you can get a lot denser workloads, you're not going to just go, "Oh, I've X number of c7000 enclosures, or even DLs, so I'm going to get the same amount." You're going to get consolidation. You're going to get more one pane of management than what you did before. Therefore, figure out how to take advantage of that.

We give out certification training on HPE product lines. Synergy is one of the product lines. It's part of our composable infrastructure in our hybrid IT training. We use Synergy for giving customers and partners hands-on experience.

It gets us lots of training-development work because the product is changing all the time. It's a relatively new product. It was introduced a couple of years ago and it's changing quite rapidly. That's a benefit for us as we continue to update the training of it.

The key advantage that we teach people is speed to market, or speed to productivity, thus, reducing the time it takes to provision business services. That's the key positive aspect of Synergy.

Composability. We're developing training. We show our partners the value of composability and how it can meet their needs.

I would just like it to work.

The stability is poor. It's a relatively young product and the management solution that drives the product shows its signs of immaturity. There is a new version being released this week. Things are getting better but they need to get better more quickly.

From a scalability perspective, the platform is great.

Technical support is poor. We've had issues with the system. Firmware upgrades, for example, did not go as they should have gone. After placing a support call to HPE, several weeks later problems actually got worse as a result of what they instructed us to do.

We were shipped the very early solution and it's installed in a data center in Michigan and we had other people do it. We helped them do it remotely but it wasn't hands-on for us. The kit is owned by HPE but it's managed by an external company and we work with that external company to use the kit and help set it up. Our experience with them during the setup was great.

The main challenge we faced was that when it was installed it just did not work. There were faulty components and it took weeks of troubleshooting to find the faulty components, get them replaced. Getting help from HPE was difficult. Nobody knew about the product. It was a brand-new product and people had not been trained on it. That part was not a great experience.

The setup was very complex. The intention for Synergy is that it's auto-discovery. You turn the power on and everything happens and it's all done for you. It absolutely did not work that way. If you have one faulty component - and we had several - it just does not do what it says on the tin. Again, it was an early production model, so we understand things go wrong. But again, getting support for the product was very difficult because nobody knew about the product because it was brand-new.

Come on a training course. Find out what it can do for you.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that composability is the way to go. No one else can do it. It will be a great win for HPE when it works.

It decreases deployment time, certainly, when it works. I can get an operating system or a hypervisor deployed within five minutes. Whereas prior, it might have taken me five hours to do the same job. It's quite significant. What we don't see are the 700 hours that we have to spend setting it up and getting past the bugs in the software to make it work. When it's working its fine. I don't tell customers this. However, it is marketed as a panacea and, with the appropriate work, it can be.

I rate Synergy at five out of ten. Once they resolve the issues, it'll be great. The product is only two years old. In another year, another two years maybe, it'll be fantastic. It's just, the reality is, it's breaking new ground. No one else has this solution and there are issues with it. It's possible that much of the skill that was within HPE as a company, is no longer with the company. As a result of people moving away from the company, HPE is left with insufficient expertise, especially in the support area.

Our primary use case is virtual desktop infrastructure. We use them to run VMware Horizon View for engineering applications and higher-end desktop users.

The primary workload is workstations using NVIDIA Tesla cards. It helps our engineering students to run CAD applications no matter where they are on campus, instead of having to go to a lab to do it.

The biggest example is that, instead of having to buy a bunch of workstations - 29 or 30 for a room - we can just implement 50 VDIs and students can use them anywhere. Students don't particularly like to come to a lab just to do work. They like to work collaboratively. This gives them the ability not only to do that, but it also gives them the ability to do it in a classroom. Even if they're in a regular classroom, they have access to higher-performance machines to do simulations and that kind of stuff.

In terms of our IT landscape, it's self-managing. It's self-contained. And because it's OneView, it's the same management interface as we use for the rest of the infrastructure, so I only have to learn one tool.

When it comes to implementing new business requirements, if they need more machines, or the number of students increases in that particular discipline, it's very easy to replicate our current machines. Getting things online and being able to provide those workstations is much faster. Once we have it up and running, to deploy new virtual machines there is probably a 90 percent decrease in the time needed to get them up to speed.

Also, as far as the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team goes, we don't have a lot of bodies on our team. The easier things are and the more consistent they are, the more we can do more with less.

In addition, Synergy has reduced our cost of operations. It costs less to run that infrastructure than 40 to 50 standalone workstations. I would say our total cost of ownership is decreasing.

The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want.

Set up is easy. If I need to add additional capacity, I can just slide new blades in and get the profiles from the previous ones. It's easy to expand.

I'd like to see the firmware updates, as well as the built-in OneView and imager in Composer, become a little more powerful and faster.

I would expect that newer blades that would go in it would have newer processors and be faster. It's pretty flexible with storage. There are new solutions on the storage front, that are going into it as well. I expect that portfolio to increase, just like with the rest of the solutions they have.

Other than that, I think everything's great.

It's been very stable. We've had no issues. It's been rock-solid.

It easily scales. You can put three frames in a rack and they all interconnect, so it's not an issue there.

Technical support is very good. We haven't really had to use it a lot, but the times we have had to use it, it's been very good.

We came to a point where we had to start replacing a bunch of workstations. We sat down and thought about what the best path forward would be and what flexibility we wanted in the product. Once we worked through that, this solution was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward. We've been using HPE products for a long time. We've been using blade servers for a while. We were coming off a c7000 solution, so it was really easy to understand what they were doing and just jump right in. It wasn't a big, major shift. Just an evolution to a better product.

We used a reseller - NWN. Our experience with them has been very good.

We have seen a huge ROI. Instead of having to buy 50 workstations - and we didn't have room for them, where we would need another classroom or another area - we didn't have to invest in any of that. Air conditioning was already taken care of. Power was already taken care of because it's in the data center, so we didn't need to worry about outfitting a classroom with furniture, new workstations, and everything else.

We've been an HPE shop for a long time, so we really didn't have any other vendors. We knew everything was rock-solid. It was an environment that we were comfortable with. All my staff is trained in it and it didn't make any sense for us to really look at any other product.

But honestly, I don't think there's any other product that is at that level today. Most products are probably two to three years behind. I had no problems. I was very comfortable with it.

Make sure you understand the whole solution. If you're used to doing things the old, manual way, make sure you understand what OneView does, and how it can automate and orchestrate bringing the platform up to speed, and then, what happens after that. If you do that, you'll easily see that it's a big time-saver and it's much easier to manage.

The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that it is a lot simpler than what I thought it was going to be like, when we were going to deploy.

I would rate Synergy as ten out ten because

• it's easy to use
• rock-solid
• straightforward to deploy
• easy to expand.