HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

We use it for converged infrastructure (compute). We are using it for Hyper-V and our SQL environments right now. We are doing some DevOps on it, as well.

Spinning up an environment is much quicker, because I don't have to reconfigure networking and redesign everything from the ground up. I throw a new blade into the frame and configure it based off a template.

The solution has improved the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams by taking less time to set stuff up, reducing our deployment time.

The solution has positively affected the productivity of the development team by creating environments quickly.

I was able to condense my compute into a more manageable rack space, reducing heat and power consumption.

It makes it simpler for me to manage my environment. It is one pane of glass, compared to multiple.

Stability when you upgrade needs improvement.

It is fairly stable.

It is scalable, but it is challenging to scale it. It's not as easy as just putting in another frame.

The technical support is great.

I was a HPE customer and knew I needed to condense the number of compute units that I could have in a rack space without increasing the size of the room.

The initial setup was straightforward. The expansion was complex, because adding a second frame onto the original frame caused an outage.

We used a reseller, PCM, for the deployment. Our experience with them was excellent.

We do CAPEX.

HPE was the only vendor considered.

I would recommend an HPE product because it is a good, stable product.

Biggest lesson learnt: You should set up two in parallel. In case one goes down, you can fail everything over to the other one.

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. 

Right now, we are mostly using it for building out data center services. The biggest things that we are using it for are large scale virtual farms. We have recently even started using it to have large shared database resources for shared platforms, like Informatica.

We are just using it as a server.

It is helping us sort of bridge a gap that we are having moving off of old legacy systems, like HP-UX systems and trying to move over to x86. So, it is helping fill a hardware gap that a lot of our platforms have needed in the past.

It is filling a gap in server size that we don't really have right now in previous generations.

I would like them to work more on the templates, targeting it to a larger scale organization which has to run 24/7. Maybe they can try to get that workload to target certain parts of an application that has to be on 24/7. The common example that we keep getting is with our animators. They have one template which is dedicated to their resources, and in the night, it does rendering. However, when we have stuff which is running 24/7, it's not really something that applies. So, maybe they can try finding more applicable use cases.

The solution has affected the productivity our deployment a little, but it has just been the normal getting used to the new system. I think once they get used to it, it will be fine.

It seems pretty stable. We haven't had any issues that I'm aware of. We have not had any outages.

Just considering how we're using it, we are really using it for the bare bones infrastructure. I think if we were using Synergy in probably the way that most teams or organizations were expected to use it, it probably scales a lot better for us because we are looking at it the bare bones CPU memory and how it works. 

Scaling is difficult, but that's always going to be the case.

I don't work with the technical support.

We started moving data centers, so we had to invest in a new solution.

The initial setup was complex. From what I was told, there were issues initially with getting the SFPs on the floor for our data center and something with the image, but I think that was on our service provider' side. They couldn't get the image to deploy with the right drivers and stuff.

We worked directly with HPE.

We have not yet seen ROI.

It has not yet reduced our cost of operations.

It has not yet reduced our IT infrastructure cost.

I would recommend that anybody who does look at Simplicity to look into Synergy. Look into it before they deploy. They should look and make sure it is compatible for their environment.

At the scale that we are at, we don't really have too many use cases right now where we can leverage all the technologies behind it. So, it's unfortunate but we are looking forward to getting to that point. We just have to slowly bridge that gap.

It is fulfilling our needs. It is not doing anything that has been too different than how we're already using it. Because of how we are using it as a bare bones servers, we just see it as a server.

We just haven't really integrated it into the public cloud or hybrid cloud. We are testing out Simplicity and Nimble now, so that might already be a feature.

We were evaluating it to replace some of our older infrastructure. We have Dell M1000e Blade chassis. We were doing a proof of concept for the last three months with it.

It would cover all kinds of workloads. We have Oracle Databases, we have SQL databases, we have web servers. There's a VMware environment with VMs that manage all sorts of workloads.

In our case, it would not be an improvement over the way our company functions. We have unique scaling demands. Our storage demands scale very differently than our compute demand scales. So doing HCI anything doesn't really fit well, currently, with how we operate. But that's why we were testing it. We were trying to figure out how can we scale it, or can we scale it, so that it fits within what we're currently required to do. We are not going to be able to do HCI currently. We're looking at other solutions.

The most valuable feature, personally, is that I'm already very familiar with OneView because we manage 3PAR storage as well. Having familiarity with OneView and the 3PAR infrastructure, and being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform, are the most valuable aspects to me.

If it would be possible to connect clusters of five with other clusters, so that they could all share resources, that would change the game for us. It would make it a viable solution for us.

There is room for improvement with support. That's a big one because of the struggle we had getting the technical expertise which we needed. Improving support is hard to do. It's a global company. They've got disparate teams with disparate specialties all over the place and it's a very new product. So we tried to take all that into account when we were evaluating. In the end, before you push a product out, your support has to know how it works and how to support it.

It is very stable. We didn't have any problems with the stability at all.

Obviously, it's very scalable. You're limited to five total - not chassis, they call them something else - but you're limited to five. So it is scalable to a point. But that's where we run into our problems because we need all of our servers in our infrastructure to have access to my storage. We can't segment out storage and have it only available to these five chassis.

We did use technical support and I would rate it poorly. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it a five. It wasn't terrible, but it's the fact that it's such a new product and it doesn't seem like even the people who are supposed to be supporting it really understand it yet. 

We went around and around in circles on one particular issue for about two weeks and it was a simple "check the box" in this area. When we finally checked the box, everything started working, but it took us two weeks to figure that out with their help.

The solution we have now works but, like technology always has, it gets old and then you have end-of-life, end-of-support and you have to make other choices. Everybody's going HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, so we're trying to evaluate that.

Configuration was difficult because it's so new. Even the people at HPE weren't well-versed on how to configure it correctly. So it took a lot longer to configure than we thought it would. But once we got it configured, it functioned very well.

It took us about a month to get it configured, to get all the bugs worked out. Then we were able to utilize it for about two months as part of our proof of concept.

Ninety percent of it was straightforward. The ten percent that was complex was only complex because it's not very intuitive. You have to know where to go within OneView to find the options that you need. And because it's not intuitive, it's not easy for someone who has never done it before to do it. And it wasn't easy for the people who were supposed to know how to do it, either.

We had HPE consultants and a VAR. We had about six people, four from HPE, two from our VAR, and our whole team working on it for a month to try to deploy it. It was a struggle.

We're also looking at the Dell EMC MX chassis. When we finished our HPE proof of concept, we started the Dell EMC proof of concept. That's what we're doing currently.

The biggest lesson I learned personally, using Synergy, was that it takes quite a while to properly evaluate something as complex as Synergy. Two weeks in, I was ready to just say, "This as a piece of junk and I never want to use it." But two months in, it was actually working really well and I was trying to figure out how we could make it work in our environment. It takes a while, but if you can get it set up right and get a little bit of expertise in it, it's a wonderful platform.

My advice would be to take your time. Get very familiar with it and make sure it's going to meet the needs that your business has, because it may not. Or maybe it fits perfectly. If you don't take the time to really study it then you won't know, and you don't want to get stuck. That's would be an expensive mistake to make.

The product is well-designed and engineered. They've thought through a lot of the things that were problems with the c7000 chassis, for example, and they've made a lot of improvements. From an engineering perspective, I would give it an eight out of ten. It might be right for all workloads but it's not right for all environments. Our environment is one of those that doesn't fit well with HCI.

It's our day-to-day production device. We deploy our workloads and VMs in clusters on it.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly, by using the Composer for efficiency. It has also improved the productivity of our development team due to the efficiency of being able to deploy via Composer. We're able to deploy development environments rapidly. We have seen about a 25 percent reduction in deployment times.

Ease of use.

It's absolutely reliable. Zero outages.

It's easily scalable.

Technical support is solid. We really haven't had issues with it, so we haven't had to go down that path much yet.

We had aging gear. We went from c7000s into Synergy.

The initial setup was straightforward. We met them at the data center for four days. We racked, stacked, and deployed it. They showed me the ropes. It was easy.

We used an integrator/reseller. They were solid.

We've seen ROI through density and capacity into it. Where I had four c7000 chassis running a lot of standalone stuff, I was able to consolidate a lot of that and virtualize it. It has reduced our cost of operations and IT infrastructure costs, the latter by about 50 percent. With aging gear that needed long-term maintenance, consolidating into a chassis or two reduced maintenance costs.

We went with Synergy because it was the best-in-breed and the next generation, from the existing c7000s. We're exclusively an HPE shop, so we didn't really fish around.

Definitely go with it. Use this product. It's best-in-breed. The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to continue using this solution.

I would give it a nine out of ten for sure because it's 100 percent reliable and for the ease of use. I seldom give anything a ten. There's always room for improvement, I'm just not thinking of a specific feature or two that are missing, but there is certainly a feature or two missing.

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.