HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

We are going to use it for the SQL server and hypervisors, thus for virtualization. From our point of view, it is the compute power that we are really looking to use. So, expanding on what we have been doing with the C7000 series, and moving it into Synergy.

We are just in the process of building it out. We have not had a chance to review what it will do for us in terms of what we currently have.

We are hoping rather than having to do manual tasks. We can redeploy resources to do other tasks. Automation saves us time and effort when doing these mundane tasks.

The composable infrastructure, so being able to build our own server profiles, then build up the infrastructure that we need from compute modules. Just automating all the management tasks that we have for our server hardware.

It is hard to say because we have not fully implemented it yet.

One of the issues that we that we have been having is with the firmware baselining. So, we need to just making sure that we get that working. However, we are in the early stages. It may well be that we just tweak a few things, then it does everything for us.

It seems to be really stable. We did blow one hardware model, but I think that was just a build issue. Other than that, it has been very stable.

On the scalability, it looks like it is right there for us, which is really good.

I have not used technical support yet.

We previously used the C7000 blade infrastructure, but that was kind of one enclosure with servers, and they were able to scale using multiple frames, multiple frame groups, etc. 

So, we were starting to outgrow our C7000 series. We started to grow our SAN network, therefore we had gone from 8G to 32G. Thus, our virtualization stage was growing, so we needed capacity. With the Synergy environment, we can just scale out. That is what we could not really do with the C7000 series.

Our reseller installed it; a third-party.

No. We are an HPE outfit, so everything is HPE.

Understand your needs, understand where you are going, and what your future and the future of the industry are. Make sure you invest and research into all the products that are available.

Synergy is first in class for composable infrastructure. It has the scalability that meets our future needs and the automation that builds into something that we are really looking forward to using.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Support, reliability, stability and the feature technologies which are included in the product.

Primary use is data storage.

Performance is about a seven out of 10.

It hasn't improved things.

We've been experimenting with shared storage.

We just started. Because we're using 2012, we're having issues making templates and such.

We're having issues with the install process, and integrating our installation with the new technology.

We haven't had issues with stability because we're using 2012.

We haven't had to scale yet.

They're okay, but they could improve. We have their technicians on site, and we think they need some more experience.

We were using standard C7000. It was working fine, but it doesn't have shared storage.

Straightforward.

Cisco. 

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• quick support
• reliability, of course.

I rate this solution a seven out of 10 because I think we were promised a little more than we were given. It's true, they are working very hard to try to help.

If you're planning on going with Windows 2016, go ahead, use it. But expect to have some difficulties.

My primary use case was to familiarize myself with this new HPE product because I know it is a replacement for the old C7000 chassis, so for me it was interesting to see the new features, to know the product as a whole.

Everything is combined in one chassis, you have storage, compute, networking. So you save a lot of space in the datacenter.

The most valuable is the OneView interface. You can do all the management steps you need to do to configure it, and you can see everything for management, for error reporting, monitoring, etc.

I don't know because this was the first time I've seen this product and I'm not very familiar with it. I need some time to work on it, to play with it.

I cannot say. I would need to test it in a proper environment.

From what I've tested, it looks scalable.

We are very pleased with the support of HPE.

We used other HPE products.

It was easy to follow the guides. It was straightforward.

The most important criteria for me, when selecting a vendor, is support.

I would tell others to give it a try.

Primary use case is for Oracle Servers to store a large database.

Right now the performance is good, but we have only had the solution installed in production for two months.

First of all, it's new hardware. So everybody noticed very large improvement in data processing. A lot of activity which took hours now takes, let's say, tens of minutes. So it's a very visible improvement in quality.

I think the ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

When templates are created, there are some steps where you need to reboot the machines. Being in production, this is not a good idea. For example, if you reconfigure the network, you should not have to reboot the machine. You should just apply the new template and that's it.

Right now, it's stable. But we have only had it for five months, three months in proof of concept and two months in production. But we haven't have any issues up until now.

No issues.

We haven't had to call them. HPE installed it, that was about it. We have been able to manage it very easily since.

We had some old generation servers, we needed to replace them. This was the newest technology, so we went with the newest technology.

Also, we have been working with HPE for a long, long time. So we just stuck with what we know.

I think we needed HPE only for the hardware install. After that, I don't think we really needed them.

I give it an eight out of 10, because of the rebooting issue I mentioned above.

It's worth acquiring this if you have a larger datacenter, or if you have a lot of operations being done on a daily basis. These are the main reasons why you should take this approach.

Internally, we use it for VSAN as well as Docker, with the flexibility to flop between the two solutions at will. We also demonstrate the solution for multiple customers.

Performance is fantastic.

The big benefit that we are seeing is the fact that we are so highly flexible. It makes things more agile. We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry.

• The composable infrastructure with the Image Streamer.
• Being able to seamlessly migrate from one operating environment to another within minutes, is invaluable.

I'm very curious to see what comes with 4.0.

The big thing will be streamlining the Image Streamer process for deployment. The actual frame itself - Composer, OneView, all that - works fantastic. The more granular permissions that I know are coming are great. That answered a lot of our big questions and big customer demand. 

Now it's about the flexibility and the simplicity of using the product day to day and getting new features stood up as customer demands come forward. I'm not sure exactly what I want next but I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

Stability is fantastic at this point. I think it's come a long way. I think with the latest versions, especially the new version coming out in December, it's been fantastic and we're looking forward to it.

The scalability is fantastic. It goes from a relatively small size to as large as you want it to go. I've yet to find a customer that couldn't use Synergy to scale to their needs.

I've used tech support extensively. They've been fantastic with the solution so far. I've been engaged on several support calls as we stood up our frame and got things going. We ran into some issues that were very unique, to say the least. We were engaged with support within minutes, case was resolved quickly, we were escalated when we needed to be escalated, and everything was seamless. I mean it was, overall, a great experience.

It has gotten better. The initial setup we did was on 3.0 and that was overly complex. With 3.10, everything's been changed, revolutionized, the guided setup made things a breeze. I've been able to walk colleagues of mine through it. I'm able to demonstrate to customers how easy it is to set the frame up and get things going right out of the box. That's been an incredible change.

We've gotten enough training that we're able to set the product up for our customers and walk customers through it without the need for having HPE expertise on site. Worse case scenario, they're a phone call away, but it's been so simple to use, it's been fantastic.

For us, when selecting a vendor,

• Simplicity is a big factor. We've got a very broad range of customers, including ourselves.
• We're looking at what is fast, what is simple, does performance and value meet those expectations? 
• We're looking for stuff where there's not a whole lot of, I don't want to say hands-on, but where there's not a lot of need to be nitty-gritty to get things going quickly.
• The ability to customize things for our customers' environments is great.

Those are all the features we're looking for when we're looking for our partner. We evaluate, obviously, agnostic across the board, as a partner. So we're constantly evaluating HPE versus Dell versus Cisco, and time and time again HPE wins that battle because of the simplicity; because of the feature-rich environment. They're just leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else.

I would give it an eight out of 10 overall. It is a great solution. Obviously, we had a few stumbles. We still get a lot of questions of "Why Synergy versus the current generation products?" Some of those things aren't always apparent. I do know that with things coming down the road, with Photonics and the like, it's going to alleviate a lot of other things. It's a solution that's most of the way there. I'm looking forward to seeing it get across the finish line to be the all encompassing datacenter solution for our customers.

There's no other solution that's similar. This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market. If you're researching this, you're going down the right path. The best thing to do is actually get hands-on and get a demo. Contact HPE and start taking a look at the advance features and start looking at how your applications and demands are going to be met and how you want to customize your experience going forward.

I believe, compared to the C7000, which is the mainstream in Brazil, it delivers a significant amount of innovation and flexibility, and I think people there will love it. The way Brazilians see things is that, "Okay, I need something that works. I need something easy to manage, because it's expensive, manpower is expensive. And I need a reliable platform, which is easily managed, so everybody can understand and use it with ease, with no problems, and that delivers value to their business.

I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame. I understand why you cannot present storage to compute nodes on other frames, but that is a question that sometimes I get from customers. Why not? I say, "Okay, you have to have a cable running over and have another SAN switch on the second frame. It will not be easy. I don't know if HPE is satisfied with this approach. They're saying, "Okay, let's stick with the drawer presenting volumes within the same frame." But the satellite architecture it's incredible. It was very well thought out. 

And the management ring, I think it's also great. 

These advancements - regardless of the advancements on chips, on more memory, addressing, computing, etc., customers expect that - but with this architecture of the management rings, this is really nice. This is a very nice idea. 

The Image Streamer, I see the value of it. Hopefully, customers will see the value of it, but I don't expect many Brazilians deploying Image Streamers, because they don't have this culture.

OneView, as a single point, a single management tool, it makes me delirious. It's really nice. People developing using the API for OneView, I don't see it too much. Brazilians are still at the beginning of this idea of consuming IT as a service. Their approach is, "Okay, I have all the APIs exposed and I can program my own Chef recipe and simple recipe and use and orchestrate Synergy the way I want." They are still in the early stages of this, but maybe it will gain traction in the future.

I rate Synergy a nine out of 10 because there's no perfection. But I think that in terms of the proposition of the product, what the product wants to achieve, they really achieved it. I was at the booth (at the Discover conference in Madrid) on the next generation of Synergy and I talked to an engineer. I asked what has changed? He said we changed some specs, etc. We delivered the Image Streamer composing Windows machines, we put the VC with an extra gig, etc. It was expected. It is a minor advance, in my opinion. This is not bad, this is good. This means they met their criteria, the whole criteria, in the initial launch of the product, so there is nothing to evolve into, all of a sudden.

So, to really evolve the product from where it is right now, it will take time. That means the product was very well conceived, they mostly meet their goals for the product. The next generation, let's say the ServerSpec for Windows, it's just minor stuff, but we expected it, so this is a very good sign. It's a very mature product from the start.

What I would like to see is a little bit more of architecture-oriented advertising campaigns or events for customers; not on the product itself, but more on the way they advertise products. They are too focused on the features. This is okay, but sometimes what I see that people lack is, "Okay, I understood the features, but how can I use this in practical terms? How can I put my Oracle in there? How can I use it for a VDI? Can I architect a huge SQL cluster with it, and what would be the best way to do that?"

I think that the documentation says that, but I don't see any events. I don't see any advertising in those terms.

In the end, it's more like they are giving the components, but they are not showing what you can do with the components. You can see you have all this, but what can I do from this? Can I make a cake out of it, or I can do an omelet? I can, but how? That's the missing link. They need to give me some ideas on how I can use this in such a way that I achieve my goals. This is the only thing that I really think the product lacks, a little bit more consumer-focused mindset. 

When you are talking about the product, talking only about features is good for me, for the partner, because I understand how to use the features to make the cake, but they don't.

It varies from area to area. From the storage guys, I get very strong support. They are very sympathetic guys, good knowledge. They are very smart people and they are really willing to help. 

From the networking guys, so-so. I don't know exactly why, but they leave you a little bit, let's say, on your own. But, in that area, the HPE documentation is very good. So you don't have to fall back to support often. 

Servers, I don't really need support, because you can find your way around. 

But with other stuff, software stuff especially, say Data Protector - now it's Micro Focus - it was a total nightmare. 

So, it varies from area to area and I can see within HPE they have different approaches in different areas. The storage guys are more like a family. They work together, they are committed together. The networking guys, they are more "I'm a self-made man, so it's me, it's him," it's not us. I feel that more or less. And servers, it's okay: "What do you need, give me a yell. I'll help you with that." Simplivity, I haven't had any experience with Simplivity as of yet. So, I can't tell you anything about it. 

But for Synergy, the Synergy guys, they are very good, really supportive.

In Brazil, they have a culture of reusing things, they don't like to dispose of a server every three years or so. I know in Europe and United States, a refresh cycle of three years is absolutely normal and they are ready to scrap their G7, scrap their G8, and get the G9. But in Brazil you can find G5 easily, G5 and G6. They have this culture of extending the lifetime of the product as much as they can or until it breaks.

With Simplivity, I think that we can address that very nicely, because as you can expand, it's the latest technology and you can put so many things in it. You can put storage, it can present every compute node, you can support satellites and expand the chassis. I believe that this will address this behavior that the Brazilians have and they'll say, "Okay, so I can invest in this platform now and believe that seven years from now, it will be the same. I will still be able to put hardware on it, I can still use it." And that will create fidelity from them for HPE.

The only driver, I cannot state this strongly enough, the only driver that I face when with I'm a customer, and I meet Dell or I meet Lenovo there, is money. They like them because they're cheaper.

I have never heard a customer saying HPE has a better product. I have never heard anybody say a Dell server is better than an HPE server; a Lenovo server is better than an HPE server. I always hear them say it's cheaper. This is what compels them to buy Dell, on whichever level, whether it's networking, storage, servers.

I just took my certification in Synergy. I was one of the first technicians in Brazil who qualified for Synergy. The main driver for me to take the certification for this platform is because I deem Synergy like an evolutionary platform rather than revolutionary. I think the machine will be the revolution, but Synergy is an evolutionary platform.

HPE is really the leading platform. I heard once that HPE is a company that is run by engineers. And engineers are passionate about it. Dell doesn't create things. Dell just manufactures things. That's why I love HPE technology so much, because I understand that HPE is really about engineering stuff and creating stuff and doing it better. Dell, they are just getting parts somewhere. They are assembling it, and they are selling it cheaper. 

That's why I really love HPE and I'm a strong partner. There's a strong partnership with HPE and I don't see leaving it anytime in the future. I come to the HPE Discover conference very often, attended the last Discover in Las Vegas. I'm attending this one in Madrid, and every time, the same: My commitment with HPE gets stronger and stronger and I really love the technology.