HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The features that are the most valuable to us are its scalability, performance, and cost. It's also very easy to use, which is a huge advantage for our IT department.

The biggest improvement to our organization is that we can now expand our IT infrastructure easily. We can seamlessly implement additional IT assets if we want, whether that's to execute different plans or to remain consistent in our operations. We can changes things as we need to as we go along. With blades, it's a lot simpler for us to deploy, expand, and virtualize.

It lacks a reboot service when the firmware breaks and needs upgrading. It also needs easier installation.

We have no issues with deployment.

We had a few past issues, but they were mostly the result of old firmware versions and our fear of upgrading them in time.

It's very scalable as we keep adding more blades as needed. With one enclosure, we can have 16 blades or just three. I don't think we'll ever go back to the old DL3x.

Technical support is good. We initially went with a partner for support, but we now use HP services for going live of some environments, especially around some light-wear blades.

The initial setup was complicated. You have to understand your environment before you let yourself expand through it.

We're an HP shop with hardware and software, so we stick with them for all our IT.

Plan, plan, and plan some more. Really understand what you want to do because it can be a great integration opportunity. Make sure you work with a partner who understands your infrastructure well. Understand also how products from different vendors like NetApp, EMC, Cisco, etc. work together, especially with different firmware versions.

The absolute number one thing that is the most valuable to me with all my HP products, BladeSystem included, is stability. They're all very stable. Secondly, HP offers excellent support.

It takes away our employees' worries about having to disconnect. We don't use HP's services, but in terms of hardware, we're happy with it.

I'd love to see more collaboration between HP, Cisco, and Microsoft. Those are the big names to us in the market. I'd like to see them work together and not compete and be nasty.

We've been HP customers for 15 years now.

Deployment has been fine for us.

We've had no issues with stability.

Scalability comes without saying. HP has scalable storage and I'd like to thank them for requisitioning 3PAR as that's actually added good technology. They worked with us to migrate from old systems.

Support is excellent and I can see a natural growth in their product. There is no decrease in quality from when we first used it 10 years ago to now. Everything is naturally growing up. Their features and return of the features and also accommodation of new accounts. That's something that they do.

HP has a heritage you know. As I say, we love their solution. We trust their capabilities to innovate.

HP appreciates discussions. Whenever we've started new projects, they bring the sales guy, engineers, and senior solutions specialist. We sit and talk and we set objectives and accordingly we define the projects to execute and monitor.

I don't think that there is anything else that's better.

The most valuable features are its stability, reliability, ease of management, and high performance. In fact, the reason we buy HP products is because of their stability. The are very, very dependable in that regard.

The ease of management allows us to see issues related to server problems and the functioning of VMware products on those servers.

Scaling comes at a high cost, and it can be complex to set up. I'd also like to see how HP Synergy can improve the performance of BladeSystem.

We switched from the DLs to the BLs about 10 years ago.

Deploying it is not a problem.

It's highly stable and we have no issues.

It's scalable, but expensive because you have to buy additional blades.

The setup is easy or complex depending on what you want to do.

It's the best product for the time being so there's no reason not to buy it.

It's scalable and reliable. We're able to add as much as we can to it without worrying about it going down.

It's improved our operation and efficiency with it's great uptime. Since implementing it, we experience very little downtime.

I'd like to see HP move more towards software-defined solutions because we're looking towards software-defined networks.

It deploys perfectly.

We haven't had any technical issues, so it's very stable.

We only need to add more blades, which makes it as scalable as we can need or afford.

They have the ultimate knowledge of their products.

We were using Dell, and we switched because they couldn't provide us with service turnaround time for our environment that was sufficient for us.

If you're looking for a solution that has near 100% uptime, these blades provide that.

We got the C7000s because of connectivity and the rack space we save. You don't need one hundred cables. We're also able to have mobility for bring-your-own-device enabled by Microsoft.

It's a space saver and easier to manage, as we've gone from hundreds of cables to 13 racks. Previously, there were so many wires with 180 servers that we could trip up or fall over them.

The technical support itself is good, but you pay a lot of money for active services.

We've had no problems with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's just about connecting more, so it's scalable in that way.

We have a service contract, but we don't need it as we're small enough that we can deal with our own issues.

We're also using HP Brocade SAN switches.

It's good and functional and there's a firewall on each.

My advice would be to go for it, but never mix vendors. We got HP servers and then added Dell servers and had to deal with double management of all the servers.

We have a "super contract" with HP, which combines HP hardware, HP service, and HP maintenance. It's all combined, making it easier for me to manage the system and network team.

I have bunch of parts and a local team from HP sitting five meters away from me. All the relevant people are there -- support, outreach, etc. It's very easy to have one interface that covers a very wide scope.

One way to improve would be in the monitoring and reporting. We get one report per server and it's ten pages long. But at the end, there's no aggregate showing the order of the infrastructure. So, I have no idea how large a percentage of my CPU is used overall in the infrastructure. I'd like reporting that takes into account all the servers.

There are also some tools missing. We started with the basics and moved up to more high-capacity resource management. The existing tools will help with this, but if we wanted to get more complex, we'll need some tools it just doesn't have yet.

I regularly get emails about incidents, disc replacements, etc., but so far we haven't seen any bug issues with the Blades. It's very stable.

We have a thousand servers and five thousand users, so in terms of scalability, yes, it's been scalable and we're able to expand more if necessary.

Most of the time they're responsive, we have a service contract that covers all areas. There's no ping-pong between service providers.

It's quite straightforward. This is also outsourced to HP, so we just send the requirements; we want this kind of server, it is to be installed in that place, and then it's all processed by HP.

If you have a big company, big enough to get these kinds of contracts, it saves a lot of time and a lot of money because it's all outsourced to HP. It's very practical.

We're using different blades for different load purposes. We can decide if we want to use storage blades for storage or we can use compute modes for compute performance, and you can also upsize them. You can even combine different blades servers for greater effectiveness.

We're very satisfied with the system. I'm a Linux administrator and we quite enjoy the flexibility of the blade system.

I suppose new chips would be an improvement, but they do get new Intel chips every year. This provides better throughput on CPU workloads. 

Additionally, our network is constantly getting saturated, so I would suggest also a faster network of fabrics as another improvement.

We've been running the system for three years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any network issues on the flexed fabric ends.

You can get a blade that uses two slots instead of one. You can even put Integrity blade systems on the chassis as well, or the old Titanium systems. They can use up to four slots, actually. It's quite scalable.

We've been an HP shop for so long and that's why we stick with them. We previously used EMC.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Go for it, you'll be happy. If you're a technical person, it's quite easy to manage and operate.

The manageability of the BladeSystem is its most valuable feature for us. Within a single blade enclosure, we can manage all of our infrastructure.

It's saved space and, I suppose, cost. There's less maintenance, less wires, and smaller footprint by quite a lot. There's also virtual management as opposed to physically plugging things in.

Although we can manage from a single blade enclosure, the interface is usable for the CPU and memory aspects, the storage goes to our 3PAR, and that requires learning a different tool. We want to be able to use the same tool to provision storage from our blade management application.

Also, I'm concerned that the chassis will only last so long. New blades will comes out at some point and the chassis won't be compatible anymore. We can upgrade it, but it's easier to change the blades than it is to change the chassis.

I can't remember the exact model of the blades, but we have full-height blades and half-height blades. We've had them for four years.

We've had no deployment issues with them.

They've been stable.

We went from 60 physical servers to 10 blades. We've been able to add more blades in our recent projects as well as to upgrade them. So, no, there have been no scalability issues.

I haven't really had to use technical support.

We trust the solution. We've used HP physical servers for 10 years, and never had any issues. We looked at different storage vendors, but in terms of servers it was the reliability of the HP products that led us to these blades as well.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

I've worked with other vendors in the past, but not in a recent project.

Plan ahead. If you zone your network for active-active, you're going to get more throughput.