HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

It has easy manageability, and with iLO we are able to do everything remotely.

It's just a computer server, so we just use them for whatever things we can't virtualize so it's nothing very special in that regard as far as what sets HPEs apart from somebody else's there.

We're looking forward to OneView management, stuff like that to keep it all in check. But there's not really anything specific. It will provide a single pane of glass for management instead of going out to 50 different servers and configuring things so you get, set up a template, or do the different things through OneView. Just kick it off and replicate and automate what you're doing.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I've used other platforms in the past, but nothing specific. We wanted to have a single pane of glass for management and have consistency as much as we can so we stick with one vendor overall between blades, between rack mounts, between everything.

Proliant, they're fine. I mean it's compute, it's pretty hard to mess it up these days.

I've been a ProLiant customer for years, since the late '90s. The ProLiant series has been very innovative over the years, compared to some of the competition that are not so innovative. It's very dependable, and they keep maturing the product more and more. Especially now, I'm looking at the Hyper Converged 380, so they're re-inventing new ways to use that technology. That's a great thing right there, with the Hyper Converged space as well. The management of them is valuable. I specifically don't use them on a daily basis, I have my engineers that do since they can easily manage the servers.

It's more of a rack server, it's more of a commodity kind of device. I know what I'm buying when I buy from HPE. I get that reliable server, good service, good support, and it works.

This server is separate from the next one and I'd like it to be integrated so it becomes all-in-one.

It's very stable.

Over the years that I've been involved with a lot of different server manufacturers as far as rack managed servers, Cisco C-Series, IBM X-Series, and a lot of HPE. They're comparable in many ways but we choose a lot of HPE because we know we're getting a good, reliable product and at a good price point.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

Look at the Hyper Converged as everything's going to virtual, so look at the ProLiant in a Hyper Converged space.

The scalability. We use it for our infrastructure because we keep up with the latest generation of technology and so the scalability, the form factor, everything plays well into our data center infrastructure.

It's helpful to have standardized platforms, and so from that standpoint it works very well for our environment at our company because we have a vast distributed data center infrastructure across multiple locations so it helps to have standardized platforms to reduce operating expense and extend the lifecycle of the product. It would just be ease of maintainability and standardization to minimize.

The number of CPUs and maybe administrative interfaces. Nothing that I would site as a concern now. It's the continued maturing of the platform. There's always room for growth but I can't point to more specifics.

It's scalable just based on the physical placements of the hardware and the white space involved on the floor.

We have others that handle any deployment issues.

The more we're able to standardize on a single platform, it lowers our long term cost and it lowers support cost. I think it can be expensive, but in our particular function, we don't get involved in that aspect. The funding aspects are a totally different group, so as long as the technical parameters are met, we don't address that.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition, I don't get involved.

It's reliability, really. It just works. It's one of those we've been using for 10 plus years and I've been in the company for 10 years. We rarely have a failure; and it just keeps working. It kind of base builds, ready to go, whereas before you needed to add bits and pieces. We don't need to do that anymore. Just out of the box, plug it in and it goes.

It's been in for so long, it just works.

I think the big thing for us, which is unique, is a dedicated HPE Cloud offering in New Zealand. It would be quite cool. I don't know if that's actually feasible or viable for HPE. Cloud is something we're interested in, but the solutions in New Zealand aren't really up to it. So you have to go to Australia. You get latency issues.

Through 10 years of various iterations and a lot of cycles of a product every three years. We used to swap out but we're virtualization now, we're taking that in to account, so no issues. We have the odd drive failure, and that's about it.

On the ProLiant, we've opted not to go down the blade enclosure. We went the dedicated service of the DL380s and pretty much the scalability of that is around the network. We've got to look at some virtualization technologies there.

We've logged a few calls. They're amazing, really good. Over the years we've had a few hard-drive failures, yet it's all pretty seamless. We just put in a HPE Networking as well.

When I first started the company was looking at Dell, and I was a Compaq engineer in my day.

It has 26 internal disc slots and will take 12 gig SAS discs. We needed to run a SQL server availability groups on a pair of these, and we needed to be able build a high-speed, high-performance disc array to hold our data. The DL380 Gen-9, along with the P830 controller card with the SAS expander, gives us phenomenal performance on 10K SAS discs. They outperformed our existing SAN by a factor of 8 to 10 times.

These replaced old Dell servers and have half the footprint, being as they're a 2U server. They also used half the power. They saved us considerable amounts of money and hosting costs with our data center. Deploying these servers actually saves us money.

I can't see how you can fit much more into a small server, to be quite honest. If I was to be really picky, it needs to not drop the memory speed when you fill all the memory slots, which is a real niggle, but other than that, they've worked so well. They've done so much for us in cutting our hosting costs over the original four way boxes that these replaced. Their performance is absolutely phenomenal.

They've deployed for us without any issues.

Absolutely stunning. We also use the Gen8 on some of our other systems and the key systems that I support -- our ARP CRM and ticket and billing system. Our billing systems handles roughly two-and-a-half billion pounds a year. It's very critical.

They seem to scale brilliantly, but it's difficult to tell. Our company is a constantly growing business. Our expansion is vast -- twenty percent or more last year. The systems are still holding up really well. In fairness, we specked them up and we benchmark these servers, so the particular way we had these servers built was specific to our use, but they do really well.

We did with the original install, the Gen9's that we had. We had some of the first Gen9's that were released. We did have a slight pickup with a BIOS setting, but HP support sorted that one for us.

I inherited the Dell servers from a legacy. I just replaced them with the HP servers. Those are my preferred choice, always. Without being detrimental to Dell, we don't like their servers very much, and the HP ones have always been far better.

The most valuable features of these servers are their stability and efficiency. We can download all the firmware, drivers, agents, utilities, and any other software as a single download.

We've been with these servers for a long time. We know the book on them and we know the partners who work with us. We have confidence in them, which means we don't need to spend money and waste time on maintenance and other issues unnecessarily.

It could use less power. We want to go green and so want to use as little energy as possible.

We got this a long time ago.

They deploy without any issues.

They're very stable.

We as an organization haven't been growing, so scalability is not relevant for us.

We get technical support through our own partner, not through HP.

My colleagues who set it up said the initial setup was OK. It wasn't simple but it also wasn't complex.

We're not going to see an ROI in 2016, but hopefully in 2017.

I would recommend you use them, especially if you have other HP products.

It's highly competitive in terms of cost and performance. There were other players, but one after another, they disappeared. If you ask your customers what's most important to them, it's always cost efficiency. They always complain about paying way too much. With HP, they're getting the best product for the money.

The most improvements that could be made would not be in the hardware commodity itself, but in the firmware. There's synergy between hardware and software, so you can't view hardware in an isolated way. So the improvements I'd suggest would be in the software that runs the servers.

I've been using it for 15 years or so.

We've had stability issues, but they weren't anything that other vendors don't have. In particular, we had problems with the DL585 generation 7. It has what we call a "Monday product", which is not hard to fix, but we've had much more trouble than others. These problems seem to be recurring for us.

For our scenarios, it's scalable.

We don't get direct technical support from HP, but rather from our partners.

Overall, we have a good partnership with HP and we are heavily invested in them.

There are several valuable features of these servers, including their reliability, the general standardization of components, expandability, price, and support. I think they're miles ahead of the competition in these areas.

I think that the main area of improvement would be in the price. The price only came down for us when we went to a dual vendor solution. We resorted to negotiating prices between HP and its competitors, and would have been nice to not have gone through that trouble to get a more competitive price.

We experienced no issues with the deployments.

The stability is great. They're always bugs with IT and the computers are there to test those. I wouldn't have a job otherwise. I'd say HP servers are generally more stable than the competitors.

They're very scalable.

We do most technical support in-house. If we do go to HP, the level of tech support will depend on the type of bug, who you're speaking to, how good the answer is, and how good the result is. Often you have to skip three layers of support before you can even get any assistance.

We have a multi-vendor network, but 99% of our kit is HP. We also use Dell and IBM equipment, but we chose HP for servers because it's just easier to support the platform. Multiple vendors need multiple hardware, and for multiple hardware, there are more update methods. They don't all work the same way and they're not all as reliable.

These servers provide us with very good performance, and the blade technology allows us to do high-performance computing. It's also a really useful product for us because we need its flexibility in adding new components and blades to our existing infrastructure. That's very important for us.

The Generation 9 servers have the new UEFI firmware version instead of the traditional firmware, but we don't have that on our servers. It would be great if they could run UEFI because they have longer boot times, so there's room for improvement there.

They deploy without any issues.

We've had issues where some components fail, but overall the system runs well.

We've had no issues with scalability.

They're very, very responsive, calling us back within 10 minutes when we open a case. Normally, they'll have the problem fixed the next.

We also have a service contract where the HP guys will take care of things like firmware updates. This helps us a lot in our daily work because we don't have to worry about those particular tasks.

With blade technology, there are the blades and then the whole chassis surrounding the blades. This type of technology is more complex than the normal standalone servers.

If you're looking for high-performance computing, then blade technology is the best you can get. Also, if you're looking for GPU power, then these are the servers for you.