HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The BladeSystem with the manageability and the reliability of the BladeSystem. I used to work for HPE and with the ProLiant line so now we're pretty loyal to HPE servers, and have been for several years.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

We pretty much use the blades for everything that we can. The only reason the rack mounts are still around is because we have some fax servers that need fax boards that don't fit in the blades and that's pretty much it.

We've had other vendors trying to pitch similar hardware to us but it's something we don't even consider just because of the stability and the reliability of the HPE hardware.

That's a non-issue for us. They're easy to scale especially with the blade chassis. We stack several of them into a rack, stick in more blades whenever we need to.

We don't use them very often. Usually we have a minor issue, a hard drive or something like that so we really don't use it very often but when we need to, it's always very good.

We kind of got in on the ground floor when the blades were first coming out. We decided to make the plunge just to save space and from there, we just fell in love with the blades. A lot of people have, with the space saving and they're just easier to configure than the rack mounts. You put in the blade chassis and you slide in the blades instead of having to rack 12 servers.

We looked at Cisco UCS but the manageability of it and learning a new product wasn't something we wanted to do. We also felt like these were still a superior product.

I would tell them to strongly take a look at the HPE. Go ahead and do a bake off if you want to. If they want to prove a concepts with the Dells, Dells will give them a way to you to try them out. If you rack them up side-by-side, I think all the features set and just the reliability of HPE makes them come out ahead.

Probably the biggest thing I like about it is how easy they are, how easy it is for me to use them as building blocks for whatever system I'm working on. Whether it's another node of VMware cluster or another Microsoft cluster, it's really easy for me to be able to do. I can move them real easy around my data center. They're heavy compute but really easy and functional to use.

For me the benefit is the expandability. I can basically fit 16-blade Chassis inside of a 10U location as opposed to 16 rack mounts would be 32U in my cabinet. It's a lot more power, so I can really shrink my data center down a lot and still provide the same level of complement.

There's a cost saving, as there's a smaller real estate. It's not necessarily less hardware, but it reduces the power and the cooling requirements within the data center and the space is what I need.

They're physically big, about 240 lbs, but it's a minimal issue. I just started to get a BladeSystem that works, and I'd like to to work a little bit more with the ConvergedSystem.

They're not cheap, and for me to buy one is about $75,000 before I put any sort of server inside of it. I'd like the costing to come down a little bit.

We did look at a few others in the past, we haven't in a long time. Obviously we are an HPE shop. We did look at the Dell blades, the IBM blades, even Cisco's UCS system as well for a while, so we did actually do the proper comparisons across everything.

We chose HPE as everyone already knew the systems, knew how they worked. Ultimately, going through the other systems, HPE was the easiest one to go in and just start setting up and configuring right away out of the gate.

Part of it is really going to depend on what your use case for it is. If it's just running general server pools, then you get in there really fast, get it set up, run it using OneView obviously, which makes life a lot easier, because then you've got a single pane of glass to manage all your environments. That's the big reason I would use it.

We used to have many physical servers spending energy and space in our data center. Now most of our servers are virtually running in a blade server infrastructure. We use the BladeSystem, ProLiant, and 3PAR for storage and we're trying to create a hybrid environment infrastructure. Also, OneView provides us with more visibility and you can manage what you can see.

It's about standardizing the infrastructure. Now we're only using one physical infrastructure and one software platform for the management.

It would be nice if it could integrate with cloud systems.

We never have downtime caused by this solution. Mainly when we have a downtime it's caused by a planned maintenance or something similar.

When we need to grow, we just buy another BladeSystem and ProLiant, then add it to the system. It's modular, so we can simply add in devices when we need.

We have a TS contract with an HPE partner.

We were using many different servers and we needed to standardize our infrastructure.

Tecnasa installed the system for us.

You will need to determine you parameters and your requirements so you can decide which products will best fit your needs.

• The space saving which has helped to reduce our cabling.
• It makes it a lot easier to bring up a new system. When a new blade comes in, we slide it in the chassis and we're done. I don't have to spend time wiring up a new server. It's just there, with my team spending less time racking something and getting it configured. We're just ready to go.
• It's the speed that which we can deploy new systems.

I would guess it crosses over as the reduced cost on real estate as if we've got less room, there's less cabinets we need to buy at a data center. I don't know that there's really a cost benefit from the hardware standpoint. A standalone server is going to be cost comparable to a blade, maybe even cheaper. I guess the business is going to save money by using less man hours to get it up and spend less money on real estate.

It'd come from a software standpoint - software support on the BladeSystem, particularly with Helion and OneView in that if you're using the Cisco fabric extenders instead of the HPE fabric extenders, there's a lot of functionality that you can't use. Because our network stack is Cisco, we can't do a lot of that automated provisioning of new blades because it's not supported. That's one thing that we'd really like to see HPE implement - true supportability of the Cisco fabric extenders.

The other thing is the support. With our initial purchase, we bought three chassis and maybe 15 or 20 blades. Out of that, we had probably a 20% failure rate within the first few weeks. It was really high and enough to make us concerned. We spent a lot of money on the chassis. We're married to them at this point since we don't want to throw the chassis away. The chassis were fine, but the blade servers themselves had a high failure rate, which didn't give us a lot of confidence.

Since then, everything's been fairly reliable, very few problems as of late, probably on the same frequency as we do with the rack mount servers. Whereas previously the rack mount servers never had a problem, Blades servers come with loads of problems. It could be completely anecdotal coincidence.

We haven't had to do a lot of technical support beyond that initial failure rate as it was resolved very quickly. If it's a bad memory issue or similar, the guys are out the same day, and have replaced the broken piece or the entire blade.

Deployment is easy. We just slide the blade in and put an OS on it and we're done. It's a lot easier than dealing with the rack mount servers and it is a lot faster.

The reliability, has gotten better; initially it was bad. I don't think there's anything bad to say at this point beyond those initial first impressions.

We looked at also using the Cisco UCS platform. The UCS I felt was more complicated than what we needed. Perhaps another customer might choose it over HPs, but the features that UCS had didn't appeal or apply to us. If you're standing up dozens and dozens of chassis on a daily or weekly basis, then maybe those copy/paste features in the Cisco systems would benefit. But for us, I like the simplicity of the HP BladeSystem. I liked it; all of our staff are already familiar with HPE hardware, so they knew they could take it apart and do whatever maintenance they needed to do. With the Cisco, it was learning curve that we didn't want to have to ramp through. We still use it because Cisco requires you to use their play systems for the phone products.

If you're somebody who's undergoing rapid growth and not standardized on a platform yet, then I'd tell you that it depends on your environment. If you're already an HPE customer, then I'm going to say your engineers already know it. If you're not deploying 1,000 chassis, then the simplicity of using the HPE blades, it's so familiar to rack mount, the management interface, it's almost identical if you know iLO then it's already there. It's easy to set up and it's much lower cost than Cisco.

• It's easy to perform an upgrade
• The failover solutions
• The blade enclosure system
• The way it's designed
• Failover for network connectivity
• Storage uplinks
• = it's a pretty solid system.

I really love the service. We have the HPE care packs - supported contracts are 24/7 response time. It's the piece of mind that if my hardware were to ever fail, I'd be back up and running quickly.

We've used it for a couple of years already and we're really happy with the product.

It's more about the redundancy. Like I said, their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers means the BladeSystem are a perfect fit for the company.

I believe there's a product called HPE OneView that I'm really interested in looking into. Right now we run off of iLO connections or we manage our servers through virtual connects. It would be nice to get them all unified into just one display and then monitor everything from there.

I've never had any issues with the BladeSystems. There's never been a situation where we were down completely. Actually, the experience has been pretty reassuring in that sense. I'm very comfortable with the product.

It's outstanding.

We've been an HPE shop for a while. We know the service that HPE offers, so there really wasn't a need to explore another company in regards to blade systems. We are happy with HPE, and for now we're going to stick with them.

The product is really simple to install. The way it's designed, you just slide whatever modules you're putting in there and it's pretty much done. HPE give it the iLO IP and you're ready to manage. Once you have it, there's not much advice I can give. It'll work and do the trick.

Reliability. I like the support that comes with it and the ease of getting it in production.

The reliability that is behind it, those efficiencies, that reliability makes sure that my customers have the services they need to support the business at all times.

Alerting the management could be better. I think OneView is new, I actually used HP SIM a lot in my day as an administrator. Now I'm in management watching my engineers use OneView. It still seems like there is still some room for improvement on that.

There have been issues but HP has always done a really good job at getting that corrected.

We run a virtual environment, a private cloud. As I need more computer power, we're able to add C7000 chassis Blade servers in, and just add those to the firm. It was relatively easy. It's getting it into production and then adding them into the cluster.

It was fine. It was pretty smooth.

We were using Cisco UCS and we recently made the change to HP BladeSystem. We changed because of the ease of use. The Cisco UCS platform was more complex to run, and I felt that with my experience with just HP stuff it was really easy to set up and manage and maintain.

It wasn't complex because I had prior experience using Blade servers at another company.

I would warn you to be prepared to be ready to talk about how you're going to be connecting your BladeSystems to the network. Especially if you don't have a total HP stack from top to bottom. For example, if you're setting those things up or connecting them with Cisco gear, being prepared in working with your partners with your vendors on ensuring that you're connecting that all in best practice.

It's reliability. We're using VMware as the backbone on it. We have High Availability so if something happens to one it switches over to everything else. We've had it for about six or seven years with no problems. To me, that's the central core of our business, that we have that connected up to StoreVirtual SANs, but we also have it connected to other SANs, and everything works seamlessly. In fact we've got the C7000 and two C3000's running with two blades. So that gives us flexibility for each of our security zones.

For us, it's the flexibility. We have to look at every nickel, and what we've found is that with the virtualization, we can get a more bang for the buck. We're using everything to it's full potential, and for a number of years we had ProLiant DL380s in the racks and they might be using one application on it. If we can take that and move it into the BladeSystem, then we can run six, seven, or eight servers off of the BladeSystem, and then everything is a lot easier to manage. We've got blades in there and we've never had any issues with equipment. We like the flexibility of being able to make a change without having to go and buy an extra drive. The whole virtual infrastructure is wonderful.

There's some little nitty-picky things and we're still trying to figure out a couple of things in the background. For functionality and everything, it runs well.

There haven't been a lot of changes, and we like that. There are newer blades, and they work seamlessly with the others. We don't need to have somebody watching it everyday and all the time. We've seem systems in the past where you've had to dedicate a resource to watching your BladeSystem, SANs, or anything else. I don't want to say "Set it and forget it." It pretty much runs, so, we've been very happy there.

We can change anytime. We can add a blade, or add RAM. In fact we did a process last summer where we went and doubled the RAM in each of the blades. That was the one limitation we had, we don't have to go "Okay, well I've got a few Megs here, I've got a few Gigs here, I can move things around." Making the workload larger, or smaller everything works very well. We're not big on hyperconvergence, but we love the ability to be able to add and subtract if we need to.

We've contacted tech support on all three phases. I haven't always been impressed with getting some guy in India. I'm sure that's the biggest complaint everybody gets. They're very qualified guys there, but between trying to understand them is difficult. I did have an incident with my blade enclosure where some of it was telling me I had a critical error. I called over and the guy says, "Well, just receipt your onboard administrator." So I did, and it worked for five minutes, and they closed my ticket. But for the most part on other things, such as when a drive dies, we can call somebody and it's there.

We do have local guys that will come out and work on things if we need it, and we have taken advantage of that in the past. With any kind of technology, it's not going to be a hundred percent. But we've generally been very happy. We've got one guy in town that we kind of like a lot, except for when he screwed up one thing, but that's going to happen anyway. We've been happy with tech support.

What we had was many, many DL380 Proliants. I had a couple of them configured as VM hosts, and then we decided that to scale building, convergence, and the flexibility of what a BladeSystem could do for you made a lot of sense. It wasn't like I said something such as "Hey, I just want to buy a BladeSystem." But our vendor kind of walked us through all the benefits, and we were very happy with how it came out, and that's where we're going. Now we can't imagine doing business without it. We went from about twenty-five servers up to over a hundred. That would not be possible if I had to put a DL380 for each application. So just having the ability to have sixty servers in a two-by-two space is outstanding. That's been one of the biggest reasons why we went with it.

We have a vendor from here in Las Vegas who came up and helped put it together. I kind of watched over the shoulder and stayed out of the way, but that has been more or less my responsibility ever since. The setup was fairly easy. Ever since, any changes have been fairly easy to do.

We were moving from ProLiant, and we have a vendor who has a big HPE shop, and I think they sell more than anybody else in Nevada, and we've been very happy with them. They said, "Well, this is what you need." And we said, "Okay." The price was fair, and we thought, "Okay, we're going to do it." One of the troubles with our systems is we have to plan so far in advance on what we want to get that we kind of target something. We might look around a little bit right at the last minute, but in this case, the name HPE, the support we get from our people and HPE, and the price just made it that we had to go that way.

The density of servers and their racks, just being able to fit as much as we can in as small space as we can. This is important because our data center space is at a premium.

We have a large DSX infrastructure for VMWare and having it uniform and having it compact is a good thing for us. As we're moving forward towards using OneView I think that'll save us some FT there as well. The older tools weren't as easy to use. I went to a session on OneView and it looked a little bit more like something we were going to be able to take advantage of and save a lot of time and configuration.

I think some of the stuff may be fixed but one of the issues we have is firmware on virtual connects. There's a little bit of overlap on the timing that causes, you know, if you're not careful it can cause a short outage for the Blade System. I think that may be fixed with OneView management.

We're working on implemented OneView. We're just barely getting started. I think OneView is addressing a lot of the issues that we have, we haven't been able to get fully into it yet due to limited resources.

It's very stable.

So really the main thing we've had was just the firmware with virtual connects can be a little touchy. There's another tool, I can't even remember what it's called, you can do a command line and avoid the issue, talking to our hospitalier but we haven't had a chance so what we've kind of done is made a whole chassis of failure domain which is kind of a waste of resources on occasion to avoid that.

Well to be honest, I haven't ever used another BladeSystem from another vendor. Our organization has an HPE Direct as far as technology goes, so I haven't really been involved in considering other platforms so.

I know they looked at Cisco a little bit but I haven't myself.

• The ability to add a lot of processing capacity and memory into a small form factor.
• Consuming less rack space and being able to quickly change components in and out as things break without disruption of the network.

We were growing beyond our data center rack spaces with our 1U2U rack mount servers. We had a lot of them. We had a lot of HP DL360 and 380 servers and we were burning rack after rack after rack. When we consolidated to blades we were able to reduce our footprint in the data center.

They probably already have a lot of the features introduced, I just don't know about them yet. I'm looking forward to using the Security Central console, which I know you do have to manage. It's a console to manage Aruba stuff, all your switches, ProCurve lines, blades, and chassis, all in one single pane of glass. I'll be able to look at all those components and how they're all working in and amongst each other.

I've used it for seven or eight years.

It has been very stable.

We use about half of each chassis that we have in place and we have redundant chassis just in case a chassis should go down. It has never happened but from a scalability stand-point we continue to increase the amount of blades we use in each of those racks, each of those chassis.

I actually haven't had to call them a lot. A lot of the information and issues that I have I've found solutions to online. It seems to be when I have called them and it wasn't about the chassis and the pro-curbs, or the switch line it seemed like they had information. The only downside was when I was looking to do an IOS upgrade, or a firmware upgrade, on the switch the way we had it set up was in a virtual stack and they were supposed to upgrade individually and the tech guy at this time gave me bad information and said they were only supposed to reboot one at a time as each switch upgraded. They all rebooted at the same time and caused an outage, which was unfortunate.

The price is acceptable.

I'd recommend it. But weigh the pros and cons of the points of failure. Because there are single points of failure unless you have two chassis in place. Also the power and the cooling consumption. Blades in the chassis seem to consume a lot of energy. We use co-location facilities so we don't have to think a lot about how much power and energy we are consuming because we don't owe the data center. It's just a fixed price for the rack. But if you own your own data center and you have to pay for the power and the cooling, blades and the chassis if you have them filled and racked and stacked, they can consume a lot of energy.

One of the useful features is the Virtual Connect module as this approach allows me to utilize fewer physical ports to reach the total number of segregated ports that I need, especially for a virtual environment. Also, there is a server profile attached which is similar, but not yet full blown, to stateless computing.

This particular product allows us to mix up the environment - not only x86 but also the HP UX where the critical application were deployed. This particular architecture (BladeSystem) also allows us to have higher density which cannot be reached by traditional rack-mount servers. Currently, the latest trend (hyper converged approach) is still under observation.

The management is great but there are other competitors that are implementing a better approach. Even HP's own latest products have this composable approach, so if there are any changes that I would like to see, they are within this particular area.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance. There are several versions that have issues with the hardware that we need to replace and update firmware to fully utilize the blade.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7.5-8/10 because currently our company has a partnership that allows us to provide services and tech support. We get a great response from the HP team, and our local teams are also ready to help.

We chose this product because of the stability and their market share is quite large. This means that older products come from the same principals that makes it easier to integrate, and the second one is that this particular item is good to implement.

It is quite straightforward, as there is a wizard. I think newbies with simple documentation can perform the initial setup.

If the project is a complex one that includes any other items (storage, network, etc.) I would strongly recommended to hire a vendor team as it is their job to not only initialize the BladeSystem, but also to integrate it with the entire solution.

We also use Cisco UCS and IBM Flex servers.

Keep observing the market as new technologies have emerged, but not all are useful yet. It is good if we have a good relationship with the solution integrator as they may also give feedback.