HPE Hyper Converged Reviews

For HPE Hyper Converged 380, the added value is not having to buy multiple elements – servers, hard disks, memories, CPU, cables, and software – because you have to unpack it, install it, and update the firmware. You have to do it all by yourself.

With this solution, I buy everything together, pre-packaged, pre-installed, and in just 15 minutes, it's installed. It just asks a few questions about IP address and user passwords, and everything is installed. You don't need to have experts in servers, storage, and networking because an IT generalist can do the installation. That's why it's good in remote sites, remote offices, lines of business, and deployments. That is the real added value of this solution.

I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes.

The HE380 is already a good step forward with the first product, which was the CS250, which was really cool. It was just a 2U box (chassis). It had a lot of performance in there, but not that much flexibility on the storage and VDI side.

HPE CS380 is really spot on. It is the right answer from HPE to give you more flexibility. The next thing will be newer, faster hardware, more flexibility, and more options to get even more flexibility.

This solution is a DL380 server which is already the best-selling server in the last 20 years in the world. It is proven technology, so I'm quite confident that the technology and the hardware are proven. It is good. It is rock solid.

I've been in IT a long time, so I realize that by attending conferences, such as a recent one, it’s not just for the announcements. For me, it's more of a networking thing, shaking hands, and getting to know people. At these events, you can meet the developers and the product managers. It opens up doors so you can become more independent of that one phone number. It’s quite important knowing people.

If you do the networking, you feel that the service you get is top notch.
You get even more service. It makes it easier to get to the second and third line of support because you know what you're talking about. You get more information than just the marketing fluff. I know what it's about because I'm able to communicate directly with the hardware and software guys and the product managers.

One of my things I do in my company is publish a technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have. There is there an article in the blog about how to install this solution in 15 minutes. My nine-year-old daughter can do it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, "we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it.

I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

It helped our business continuity. For example, if you have a failed disk or you have some errors, the system keeps running and you have time to fix it. The HPE computer center is notified automatically and they help us fix the problems.

The solution is integrated in a Hyper Converged unit. We don't really use this tool, but it manages our storage for us so that it becomes one logical unit that you can attach to the server.

Because it's so well integrated, you can't get away from it. You can't replace one part without the whole tool going down.

I would like to see more deduplication. This is incredibly important, because if you have five sets of the same piece of data, it is stored five times. We only want it stored once to save space.

This is a very stable tool. However, if you run out of space, the warnings are not very clear. Our administrators don't know that it ran of space and then the whole system is locked up. This is pretty annoying.

The scalability of this tool is very good. You can basically add more storage and seamlessly expand the current storage that you have.

We have used technical support. When we had downtime, we called technical support to help us troubleshoot the problem. It took us a very long time to get connected to them. We had different numbers on the website, and some of the numbers were wrong. You have different websites with different numbers and it's very difficult to get through to them. It took us about half an hour to deal with a P1 priority system that was down. Once we got in, it was perfect. But it took us a while to get in.

Previous to this solution, we were using normal blade servers. However, we wanted one unit where you can upgrade all of the OS and the firmware in one shot. We don't want to upgrade all the different pieces separately.

Our short list of alternatives was IBM and HPE. We don't use anybody else besides HPE for our data center. We don't use Dell. We have ordered all our stuff from HPE, so this solution was the logical choice.

You can build similar solutions by just using regular servers and then using 3PAR Storage. You can create the same kind of continuity and reliability so you don't have one unit that is enclosed.

When choosing a vendor, I look for reliability, continuity, and price.

The customers we have think it's a valuable product because of its ease of management, and its ability to work over different locations, and so on. The ease of management helps our customers’ business because they don't need to do so much with it. It just works. It's easy to provision, and so on.

I would like to see price points when there are larger solutions. If we have a solution where we’re going up against a couple hundreds of TBs, the price point is often too high.

It is a very stable solution, absolutely. When you're doing network RAID and so on, it's very stable because if one node goes down, it's still protected.

It is very scalable. You can scale up from two nodes to almost infinite nodes.

It is not difficult at all to deploy. You just plug and play, sort of. It's not very consultant-friendly.

Our customers would be looking at the top competitors like EMC and Dell. They chose StoreVisual because it’s a better product. I don't know much about the others. I only work with HPE.

The flexibility, scalability, reliability, and all the various abilities. Those are really the key elements to it.

Flexibility, it can spin up new server to meet business needs at will. I don't have to worry about buying a new box, provisioning it, all the issues that go along with that. I like the fact that it's taken us from approximately 23 servers down to three ProLiant servers running the StoreVirtual VSA. We have had a big reduction in our electricity consumption, the cooling requirements for our server room dropped dramatically and the reliability has been fantastic with it.

Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble and they've done a really nice job putting that all together. I'm very happy with it overall.

It could be cheaper, everything could be cheaper.

Excellent, I can't think of one instance where we've had downtime. It's been just outstanding all around.

We've had to add virtual machines to fulfill different server needs. Other than that we haven't had to do much since we implemented last summer. Last July is when we went live with this solution. That would be the key thing that we've been able to do with it.

I've only contacted them once when we had an issue. It was our issue, as the managers of the system, we had a space provisioning issue that we had to reach out to HPE to get assistance with. I wasn't actually on the phone with them. Our vendor, who provided this system, was interacting with HPE support but as far as I know it went very well.

We had two eight foot tall racks stuffed full of servers that were connected together in various ways.

I was in charge of hiring the people that did the setup. We had an outside vendor come in and do the installation for us and the setup seemed to go extremely smoothly. Probably out of the 23 bare metal boxes we virtualized 18 of them or something, 16 or 18 of them and that all went exactly as expected. Very few hiccups during that project.

For us, once our vendor explained this option we knew it was right for what we wanted to do. We're a marketing company and we need to change and react quickly and respond to business ideas very quickly. This virtual environment really is responsive to that. I don't see a downside to it from anybody else's point of view. I would recommend it to just about anybody who was considering it.

Our biggest considerations were how big we were going to go with it so we would end up with three ProLiants, but we need four. What's the storage capacity? What percentage of it is SSD as opposed to hard disks and those kinds of things. That is, for us, where we really had to scratch our heads and think very carefully about that to get the most out of our dollar for that and then how we would budget in the future. When you're putting it together, if you're on a tight budget, we're a small company so we had a pretty tight budget, we were able to do it in such a way to provision it pretty lightly, without a lot of headroom, knowing that in the future the scalability and flexibility of the system will really allow you to add and expand later with very little pain.

We like that HPE Hyper Converged requires only information about the solution.

It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability, and its HPC technologies and workflow provide downtime and increase the technology. It is an investment that improves profit margins to achieve breakthrough results.

This solution has optimized utilization and efficiency that simplifies the administrations for the cluster and close and supercomputers. It is also beneficial to maintain the HPC workload.

We like the fact that it is reliable.

This solution is very costly.

We have been using this solution for about three years.

It is a stable solution. 

The scalability is fair. 

We have had no issues with the technical support. 

I rate this solution eight out of ten.

Scaling and ease of management are good features. 

In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing.

I have been working with HPE for the past ten years. 

In my experience, some business cases existed in the past. From my own country's perspective, currently, we haven't seen new customers adopting HPE HyperConverged, although existing users are still on board.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten because sometimes it lags or crashes. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. It is a scalable solution. 

Customer service and support are working in the right way. 

The initial setup is easy. Features for maintenance patching, and updating are available. 

We only use it for on-premises virtualization infrastructure, not the cloud.

Most likely, it's a perpetual license.  

Our customers do not prefer subscription-based solutions, so we typically offer subscription-based support, but the license itself is perpetual.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would recommend using this solution. We are an HPE partner, so staying up-to-date with Spectrum and gaining relevant knowledge is crucial for our company's success. That's the main value for us.