HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

We are using it for SQL servers on HPE servers. We use the service across the company. We are in three countries. It serves all our users.

All our internal applications are on an SQL server. It improves performance when we use all applications on this one server.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly with some app deployments.

Compatibility and scalability are its most valuable features.

You set it up and forget about it.

I would like more storage with this solution, because we still need 3PAR or other storage outside the box for the amount of data that we have.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very good, but I'm still trying to scale more than I already have.

The technical support is remarkable and very good.

We have a policy of server renewal every three to five years, so we changed all of blade servers to Synergy.

We, as a company, need to know more about the solution, because I know there is a lot of software included that we are not using. I would like the solution to provide training, so we could be more knowledgeable about what is included.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was pretty easy to start up and use it.

We used a Mexican integrator/reseller for the deployment, who was very good. They are one of my best suppliers.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent.

Top of the list was HPE. I didn't consider any other vendors.

The solution is pretty good and very stable. It has a great support. It works as the brochure says, "It works perfectly." 

We need to learn about the all the solutions that integrate well with Synergy. E.g., it has a monitoring solution that we need to explore.

We also use Hyper-V. So, we are already using physical servers to run it.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization.

It is a continuation of converged infrastructure. That is why we are interested in it.

The solution has reduced our infrastructure costs compared to the c7000 platform.

The most valuable feature of this solution is convergence.

OneView is head and shoulders above the competition in this space, though I would like to see some improvements to it.

I would like a longer amount of data for bandwidth utilization on Ethernet ports inside, as well as uplinks. The amount of data stored on them is way too small.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages.

For me, the scalability is how much money that I need to spend on switches for how many frames, which ultimately means servers. To get the best bandwidth before the most recent product announcement, I have buy new switches every three frames. The competition is shipping a product right now where I only need switches every ten frames.

it depends on what technical support you pay for, but the lowest echelon of HPE technical support is sadly uninformed, unknowledgeable, and dependent on wrote scripts. They won't answer a question without going through their script. It's not like you're actually talking to somebody who has any depth or time using any of the equipment.

They introduced Synergy, and we waited for a while. However, the reason for investing in Synergy isn't for normal business functions or functionality reasons. The main reason was that we knew that we wanted to buy servers that we wanted to keep for five years, and there isn't a big future in the c7000 platform.

Synergy is the same product in a different package.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We were direct through HPE.

Make sure you understand your own decision-making criteria and what is important to your company. Investigate all vendor options. Question your assumptions.

Get it into your lab and test it out before you make a sizeable financial commitment.

The things that I think are important HPE doesn't, and competitors do think they are important.

The primary use case would be our virtualization platforms, ranging from our presentation layers to just commodity workloads. 

I don't know that we're too much focused on hybrid cloud just yet, since we're a service provider. A lot of our clients are paying us to host their workloads. It's not like we're running our own IT and putting it in the cloud, as well. However, as we do move things there, these workloads are probably the ones that are most opportune to move to the public cloud. So, it would generate a hybrid scenario, as these are Citrix presentation systems, and also Windows and Linux VMs, which can move back and forth.

It has improved our procurement and day zero provisioning. We are bringing in racks of Synergy which are not populated with the blades, then we are buying the blades and populating them, as our business needs. This has been pretty helpful to be able to sort of pre-package the data center with the Synergy platform, then deploy servers into it as we grow.

The solution has driven us to use the OneView platform and have more alignment with HPE's strategic directions. We are still learning what that means to us, but at least it has put us in better alignment with where HPE is at. When we do find something that doesn't work, they are incentivized to fix it better than if we weren't aligned with their vision.

Synergy has actually challenged us to rethink how our IT infrastructure teams are structured. So, we're still dealing with that. Our hope is that by having OneView, Synergy, and software-defined that we will realize the value statement over time.

So far, the solution has helped us implement our new business requirements quickly. Synergy has the ability to have everything pre-packaged and being able to slide blades in. That is what we have always liked about blade architectures: We can slide a blade in, or if we need to move it, we can go move it somewhere else. There is less cabling to deal with, etc. It is one of the attractive things of the platform that we first got excited about it.

We bought in pretty early to the composability story and being able to software-define the compute. We are realizing a fair amount of that. 

It has been in the external integrations to other platforms that we have, which aren't HPE, where some of our challenges have been. We are still working on these.

I would like to see some integrations with non-HPE platforms. The Synergy platform is working pretty well in most cases. It does what it is advertised to do. Integrating it into our larger environment that is not HPE products has been somewhat of our challenge. I would challenge HPE to go fix and address these gaps. Have a story there, because not everybody will run HPE throughout their entire data center. I have other suppliers in there, and they have to work together.

What we are observing is to upgrade a whole rack of Synergy, so four frames when it's fully loaded, we are spending about 50 human hours doing that. There is a lot of work time and wait time in there. Overall, this work effort is spread across a bunch of people and the total time is about 50 hours. I don't know what percent increase that necessarily is, but it is a lot of work that we didn't do before. So, it feels like a big increase. That is still us rationalizing how the platform should be maintained.

I would like something that makes it even easier for developers to leverage OneView. It is all API driven. However, if you are using the web GUI that is OneView, you can't get any feedback about, "If I click this button, that button, or that button, before I hit go..." Show me what the API call is. Help me develop code faster if I am not a developer who wants to go read the whole API guide. Help me point, click, and start to develop code incrementally.

Stability-wise, it has been pretty good. When we are doing maintenance events. we have had some hiccups. We have definitely lost redundancy. There was one incident where we had everything go down. For the most part, what we are observing is the redundancy in the platform is working reasonably well. With the upgrades, we are just losing redundancy. 

We're not expecting it to go down. Our expectation is we will run our workload 100 percent of time, even while we're upgrading the platform. In some instances, that's happened, and in the ones that it hasn't, it is definitely a bug that the HPE team is trying to address.

We haven't hit the scale edge of it yet. However, we like what the solution says it will do. There have been some instances where we have overrun some of the software scaling, even without being at a massive hardware scale yet in the network space inside of Synergy. They are working on this, and it is something that we hope will continue.

We often find ourselves having to get into the Tier 2 and 3 support or into the development teams. Based on our scale, and what we do with this platform and others, we tend to find more bugs that are edge cases for most other people. Therefore, Tier 1 support is of little interest to us. However, when we have gotten to the right people, the technical support has been really good.

They stopped selling the old solution. We were using the c7000 blade infrastructure from HPE.

There were other things that we could have tried to do to wire up our environment differently. Having more simplistic cabling, being able to pre-stage frames, and slide servers is the experience that we desire to have. However, if it doesn't work with the other suppliers in my data center, then the experience quickly stops mattering.

Our environment is very complex. That had a fair amount of bearing on deploying this platform. The OneView tool promises to make things simpler. Sometimes, it overlooks some of the really edge cases of the configuration to make things simpler, and that's what we found. There would be another tool to go to behind the scenes to go do what we need to do or troubleshoot. So, we have challenged the HPE team: "OneView should be the one thing to go to. There should not be something else behind it, telling me to go login here, but rejecting me because I don't have that username and password, then making me call support to login." We don't like that.

We worked directly with HPE. Our experience with them was good. They came to the table and really worked with us. We generated a lot of bug tickets and issues, so we had a lot of really challenging conversations. However, the fact that they were there to have those conversations is why we wanted them.

HPE has brought people to bear for the project that would likely have come out of a Pointnext engagement in other cases. However, we haven't directly done something with Pointnext services.

We have definitely seen performance increases in the platform. A lot of that was related to just the componentry that is in it. We have sort of bought into the vision of where the platform is going to go and are hoping to see additional performance gains there. 

Synergy feels a little heavy still on the day to upgrade operations, etc. However, we have gained some efficiencies on the provisioning front-end side.

The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware.

it was pretty much the top three: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco, when we started looking at new compute. 

We decided to maintain our partnership with HPE because it's been around a long time. We know each other really well. We do a lot of business which is not server-related. They came to the table with their pricing models, investment strategies, and the partnership that they wanted to do to make their products fit better for us, which is why we chose to stick with them.

If you are deploying solutions that are well aligned with what HPE has designed this platform to do, then you will probably have pretty good success. If you are sort of weird, like us, and the things you do come off as strange, or whatever, there will be some things you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for. Therefore, you should really be partnering with HPE. You should be asking to talk to their development teams and getting feedback, such as, "Here's what we're seeing and here's how we're using it." Sometimes, as we've heard from the development teams, we've used features that they've created in ways they didn't imagine. We had some results that we didn't expect nor did they. So, that's what we're working on. If you think you will be in a similar situation, open that communication channel early and express that need to your account team.

Deployment time has decreased, for sure. What we have detected is we think the care and feeding maintenance over time might be a little higher than what we had expected. However, that is part of: 

• How are we going to structure the team? 
• How are we going to plan the work?
• How will the solution set get better?

I don't think our development team really knows of the solution or has any interactivity with it. Therefore, it hasn't necessarily enhanced nor has it detracted from a developer standpoint either.

In our environment, with what we are trying to achieve, it still has a ways to go.

The biggest lesson learned is that if you really buy into software-defined and start moving to infrastructure as code, there is a lot of power potential there, if you can just stay the course.

The primary use case is virtualized workloads. The workload are typically packages and things that run on Linux. They are just general-purpose, virtualized workloads.

Synergy is a flexible product, so it helps us to manage our IT landscape in a more simplified, structured way.

Once we get it in, it should help us implement new business requirements quickly.

Capabilities, such as, the automated updates and integration with OneView, will ultimately help us run more resilient infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the evolution of our existing HPE portfolio, the integration with our existing tool sets, and the enhanced capabilities that OneView bring.

The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient. A spreadsheet seems a bit out-of-date

So far, the stability has been good. It has been rock solid.

One of the main reasons that we have invested in Synergy was its scalability capabilities. It hooks back into the toolsets, which means you can manage vast amounts of infrastructure from one place, essentially.

We haven't had to use the technical support yet.

It was an evolutionary step for us. We have a lot of c7000 chassis, which was the precursor to Synergy. So, we used it as an evolutionary step because you could run it in blade format, as well as starting to make use of the more composable nature of it in the toolsets and features.

It has been very straightforward to set up. We have had no real problems. Even from the onset, it's helped us out with stuff quickly.

We used Tech Data for our deployment. They were very knowledgeable and quick to help us.

Our investment should return fairly swiftly.

We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff.

We looked at a composable system from Dell EMC. That was about the only one that is in the same type of league as Synergy.

Synergy is an established product, which is the main reason that we went with it. At a time, Dell EMC had just released the PowerEdge MX7000. We are a more established HPE partner already. We received a good price and have a lot of support from HPE and the partner. We also bought an HPE Nimble at the same time, as well. The two products went together quite nicely.

Take the time to understand the ecosystem and all of the capabilities, then use that to leverage further capabilities down the road.

The more that we use it, the better that we will understand it.

We use it for ESXi installations. It is for private clouds with application servers.

It helps us manage our IT landscape because it is easy, standard, and very consolidated. You don't need to have the storage and communications apart, because it's all consolidated.

The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity.

The solution has affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams by being easy to install.

It is very standard and easy to install.

I am rating this solution an eight (out of ten) because it is really good. However, you can always improve some things.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

The scalability is very good.

We haven't used the technical support, as we haven't had any problems.

We were using the c7000 blade system. We switched because we wanted to test something new. Also, it was announced that there would be other sales.

We have a capacity plan that we do every year. When we estimated what we needed for the current year, we decided that we wanted to invest in Synergy.

The initial setup was very easy.

We used an integrator for the deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

It has kept our cost of operations stable.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to.

We evaluated HPE and Dell EMC.

It is a good solution. We are happy with it. You should try it out.

The development team is very happy with the performance.

Biggest lesson learnt: Try new things, even if it wasn't your first choice. Always look for new things, and if they're good, then you should change.

Our primary use case is data center and tech refresh/cloud.

This product is basically a step in our transformation to be more hybrid.

We are still in the transformational phase, but the benefit will definitely be the infrastructure of code components.

It does help us to manage our IT landscape with the ease of deployment through OneView.

The solution affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team with the infrastructure as code and the ease and agility to deploy.

The most valuable feature is its compatibility.

The solution has decreased our deployment time.

Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more. However, it is still a great deployment methodology overall.

In my experience, HPE has always been highly available and highly reliable. I would expect Synergy to be nothing less.

The scalability is very good. The ability to link chassis or frames together makes it simplistic, especially with the use of OneView.

I haven't had to work with technical support yet, so the product was built well.

We were using traditional HPE c7000 chassis. We needed something a bit more modernized to enable the company's transformation.

The initial setup is straightforward. The infrastructures as code enables you to fill out the configuration before you even deploy it, then it is just a one-touch deployment.

I just switched companies. My old company did not use Pointnext services. This new company does use Pointnext services, and it's a lot easier to get the hardware on demand. You don't have to worry about making those hard upfront capitol purchases.

We used ConRes for the deployment, and my experience with them has always been great.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations by at least 15 to 20 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by at least 30 percent, mainly because of the density compared to our former infrastructure.

We were looking at Nutanix, as well as the HPE Synergy. The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy. Overall, we are pleased with Synergy.

Take a serious look at Synergy.

The development team hasn't been brought into it.

We use Synergy for everything: Exchange, virtualization, and SQL. Most of our stuff is still on-premise. We are not really doing anything with hybrid cloud from Synergy right now.

It makes it easier to manage all of your infrastructure when it's more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the future proofing. As we buy new equipment, we are buying Synergy instead of continuing to buy c7000 blade enclosures and BL Series blades. Thus, I don't have to do a forklift upgrade in the future. 

Also, the increased speeds and feeds, as we went from multiple bonded 1 gig connections to 40 gig. That was huge, especially with our virtualization density. When you are running 50 VMs on one host, you really need the the speed behind it so you don't have issues.

Then, there are the ease of management and single pane of glass for everything. The single pane of glass management is huge, because in all our previous systems, depending on what we were managing, we would go to a different management point. Being able to go to one spot to get everything is helpful. I find that server profile creation is a lot easier in OneView than it was previously. We are able to stay compliant with firmware and updates, because we are assigning server profiles and reapplying them when there are changes. This makes everything a lot simpler.

For the storage modules, which can be put in a single frame, they currently can only be addressed to compute modules within the same frame. It would be nice to be able to use those to assign cross frame.

For the most part, the stability is really good. We had some challenges during the implementation and a few issues afterward, but they were all sort of related to how Synergy interacts with Nexus. Our Nexus on the network side is managed by another group, and they had just gotten Nexus, so they weren't really familiar with how Nexus even worked. Getting these two to interact well was the majority of our issues. It really didn't have anything to do with Synergy. It points to know the environment that you are putting it in and making sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's when you are figuring out what their requirements are to communicate.

The scalability is pretty huge. The compute modules and everything in the Synergy system scales up very well. It has much higher speeds and feeds than we had before.

We've done several engagements with the support from Synergy. They have all been really good engagements. The only thing that I can say which might be negative is they don't necessarily know about the Nexus connections either. However, once we got that figured out, it was good. We had several visits with engineers, when we had issues, who fixed everything. So, that was really good.

As an agency, we looking at the future constantly and evolving with what is coming out. We are really budget constrained, so continuing to operate in the same method over and over again until you realize that you have to make a change, that is really expensive. So, we are always looking for new, better ways to do things. We looked at the lifetime of the c7000 enclosures and realizing that they are not going to be around forever. We wanted to roll into something which was going to be around for a while. to avoid five or six years down the road having to do a forklift upgrade of all of our systems. This is sort of how we operate. To save ourselves in the future from having to make big changes, we can sort of easily roll into Synergy instead of having to go into it all at once.

I am sure that that initial setup was complex, but Pointnext made it look really easy.

We purchased it already configured in the rack, which was huge because you roll it into the data center, then everything is already cabled, except for your outside connections. This saves you at least two days, if not more, of putting the Legos together of the system. Then, we were able to plug the system into our network and immediately able to start to configure it. This maybe took two hours to fully configure a three-frame enclosure with 20 compute modules in it. That was extremely impressive.

Within the two hours, we were using the compute modules. Other than getting people to move off of their older servers into the frame, which is more of a business thing than technical, because you have to arrange outages, we were able to use the system immediately.

HPE Pointnext came out and did the initial configuration. Our experience with them was awesome. 

It has decreased our deployment time by about half, maybe a bit more. We used Altiris Rapid Deployment before on the c7000s, but as time went on, that platform didn't work very well anymore. Then, we were doing a lot of things manually. Even though, we were really good at doing that, it is a lot easier again to deal with a server profile or image. So, we easily cut that time down in half.

From the replacement costs versus the cost of the previous equipment, it has been much cheaper than previous gear. The performance and speed has enabled us to do more things that we weren't able to do before: Faster video streams, being able to have more hosts on a compute module, and have more efficiency all around, which has definitely paid for itself.

It is a more condensed physical footprint than our previous hardware. So, we're saving money on power and cooling. We have three power distribution panels. We have the utilization measure. We were at more than 90 percent utilization on our three panels. When we virtualized, including Synergy, that utilization went down to about 60 percent, which was pretty big. While it may not be fair to say that it was all Synergy, because there were other things involved too. We had all these individual fan units from another company, when we migrated to 3PAR, that took less power, which was also huge. There was a bunch of stuff going on during that power reduction, but Synergy was a big part of it.

Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more.

We do a biannual renewal. I know how much that renewal is, but I don't know how much it breaks down to be just Synergy, since we have our VMware, all of our physical equipment, etc. all rolled up into one renewal, which is a little over $300,000 every two years. However, only a subset of that is the Synergy product. 

There was at least about a 20 percent savings in cost over our purchase based on the purchase price of the compute modules themselves versus what we've had to pay before. It was significantly less.

I don't know if we compared anyone else. We have a very heavy blade-centric architecture right now. All of that knowledge and experience rolls right over into Synergy management. Whereas, with another vendor solution, it would not. We would be learning from ground zero. For us, it was more of an easier transition to Synergy than looking at another product.

I would definitely recommend buying it.

Most of the requirements of newer applications are based on the availability of newer technology. So, you need more speeds and feeds. You need more proxy, faster storage, and more RAM. The compute resources required for today's workloads and emerging workloads are greater than it was before. This platform is allowing us to meet those needs without having to go out and purchase more gear.

It doesn't really affect our development staff. Right now, their development environments aren't on Synergy. They are not actually using it yet. All of our production stuff is in Synergy. The development staff is using the old stuff still.

The biggest lesson learned is knowing what you are connecting Synergy to, because there are caveats there and not everything necessarily plays well with Synergy. Make sure you are talking to your HPE techs about what you need it to connect to and what is in your environment that will work well. Also, that they have tested it and proven it. Otherwise, you're going to be their guinea pig.

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.

We use it as a VMware host. We're a highly virtualized environment, so we run several VMs per blade.

With the new purchase, we've been able to upgrade our VMware from 5.5 to 6.7 to the newest version for hardware compatibility.

As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. We build customer in a box solutions that we ship out to casinos to manage their environments. This gives us added flexibility for building those out for customers.

The solution will affect the productivity of our development team shortly, as we have just purchased two of them for our development team to replace aging hardware. They will in production the next month and be on the same hardware. This will be a benefit for the development team to be able to develop in development on the same product, as we flip over to production.

The configurability of the cabinet is its most valuable feature.

Manageability is a lot less of a headache with OneView. The OneView profile pushing profiles out to hosts is pretty easy. It has decreased our deployment time by 50 percent.

I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources.

It has been very stable. We have no issues with the ones that we have in production.

That is something that we'll be able to test more as we put more in. However, we are definitely looking forward to managing multiple chassis in one environment.

We've had very good support. The initial setup was probably where we engaged with the most with tech support, and not a whole lot since then.

Our previous solution is just an older HPE chassis. We have multiple brands in the data center, but mainly c7000.

We needed to upgrade our hardware to be compatible with newer versions of VMware. Since we are basically an HPE shop, it was either newer blades for the c7000 chassis or a Synergy chassis. The Synergy chassis is the move of the future, which is what mainly influenced the purchase decision.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did run into a little issue with the depth of the box, so we had to order a deeper rack. That just delayed it a bit. However, we could have avoided this ahead of time if we knew that it was a bigger than a standard chassis.

We used an integrator for the deployment. They were very good. They were able to get us in contact quickly with the right people when we had questions.

Our maintenance and production times have been cut in half over our previous solutions. We don't have a lot of bodies, so saving engineer time is a valuable resource.

We don't have to spend as much time managing it, so there is a savings of 50 percent over our older existing solutions.

The biggest cost is the VMware licensing. 

In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000.

It was pretty much between Dell EMC and HPE. We are an HPE shop, and the Synergy chassis and the Dell EMC offering were pretty similar, so there was no real reason to change.

It is worth a good hard look. I like the options which are available for the different slots, as opposed to just straight blades. It provides a lot of flexibility, and if that's what you're looking for, then you will definitely like it.

We really haven't had any issues, other than size. Everybody has been going that way anyhow, so that is nothing bad. It's been a powerful system and reliable, so far.

Account for the size and make sure that you have the proper space in the rack, then everything else will be fine.

The solution has affected our TCO by saving us in man-hours. As far as physical licensing, power, heat, and cooling, it is all pretty much the same.