HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

Reliability and supportability are the most valuable features. We can upgrade our drivers and other software and smoothly to roll it out to the enterprise.

From my point of view, most of what we do with our servers is fairly common. So we could get the same solution elsewhere. It's about the manageability and the way that we are able to do it in the scope of the resources we have.

The ProLiant does what it needs to do. It's not entirely perfect. It could run at lower power, for instance, and it could run cooler. I guess all of that comes at a price.

These servers are very stable.

It scales in a kind of linear fashion so it's not amazing. We expected it to scale, and it does. But it's not like it scales very high. Each server is managed individually anyway so it's, maybe, not a fair question about ProLiant.

I think technical support is fair to good. Not outstanding, but fair to good. Although, having said that, we don't very often call them. So that is a good thing itself.

We've always had HPE servers, but as a proportion of our environment we have fewer HPE ProLiant servers now. We have fewer HPE hub servers than we did previously, because we're now a dual vendor. We started that about five years ago, but it's a double-edged sword. Now, we are in two environments and we have another vendor to manage. You drive down price, but it's two lots to manage. Learning how to handle this internally is quite difficult as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That's done by our engineering team.

We've got two vendors that have comparable products. We have essentially the same as the ProLiant with our alternative vendor. They have the same processor, the same type of memory, and the same memory speed. In terms of performance, we wouldn't really see that there's much difference between the two. The main differentiator is the manageability and getting it to and onto the floor.

My main advice is to standardize your internal offering. So, if you are buying something you're going to sell internally, which is effectively what I am doing, I'm selling a service, try to standardize it to a degree rather than having custom fixes for every internal customer. Then you've got some uniformity across your offering internally.

When choosing a vendor, there are two main requirements. One is for a solid, stable product. That's number one. The second thing is the ability to be able to make the deal. With our vendors, we have kind of a mixed bag. One of them doesn't really deliver on the stability and the manageability, but is excellent on service and cutting a deal. The other one is not too good at cutting the deal, but actually we know that that's the kit we want because it is very stable and very manageable.

The reliability of the hardware is a valuable feature. The way it looks is valuable as well, because when we have to set it up at a worker's terminal space, we can just see a nice face on the server and that’s important. It's easy to set up and you can get parts very easily.

The benefit is that it goes well with our customers. Customers are happy with that. We sell them, and that's how we make money.

I would like to see better support of monitoring protocols.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any crashes in over two years of deployment, so that's good.

Scalability is really only an issue for software. ProLiant is only hardware, so scalability doesn't matter at all.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward. I can just plug in a server.

We were considering Dell and some other vendors.

When selecting a vendor, the ratio between the price and quality is the main thing. I don't want to be spending too much, but I still want to get good quality. It just depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for a very inexpensive, bare bones server, then you should go for a cheaper solution. If you are looking to buy a bunch of servers, then go to Dell, for example, because they're very aggressive with their prices. HPE is just in between. It's very good. It is a bit more expensive than the others, but the quality is where you expect it to be.

The most valuable feature is reliability. We virtually have no problems with it. We run most of our applications on ProLiant DLs. We also run Exchange, and proprietary applications such as Attorney Information Manager and an accounting package called ProVantage.

It has improved our organization in terms of providing more speed and reliability while being low maintenance. We're totally dependent upon it as we move forward.

There's nothing that I would add to it, except maybe on the dashboard. There could be a little more analytics. I would like to see some proactive warnings about maintenance issues. If we were to have an issue, I'd like some more advanced warning. I’d like to see some alerting features. We’ve only a few issues, but I would like to see some alerting improvements.

In terms of stability, It's a perfect fit. We have had no stability issues whatsoever.

It's been very scalable. Maintenance wise it's a non-issue.

We have used their 24-hour tech support. They've been very good and responsive. They meet the deadline.

Before choosing HPE, we looked at Dell. Between Dell and HPE, I think you get a lot of similar bells and whistles but I think in the end HPE is the king.

HPE has excellent maintenance agreements. They provide on-site, 24-hour response times. They deliver agreements. We're not ones to readily replace equipment so they have good extended warranties, which we rely on pretty regularly. This was one of the more important criteria because I work for a law firm and they're not big on shelling out money, unless they absolutely have to. We get the biggest bang for the buck with HPE. Again, I think it's the warranty service that you receive from the HPE that makes the difference. It's reliable. You should always shop around for price. Vendors are always willing to compete in the marketplace.

The most valuable features are reliability, the ease of implementation and setup. It's all wizard-driven. Also, maintenance on the devices, spare parts availability, and, as I’ve mentioned, reliability.

We've reduced the number of physical servers, currently. So, we've brought it down from 38 servers down to about 15. Seeing that we are standardizing, it's easier to support the devices, as we don't have that many different devices on-site that need to be supported.

I looked at the technologies offered at a recent HPE conference. There are a lot of technologies that are only offered on the high-end servers. As an example, the SSD module that's embedded on the memory; that's only available on the HP DL380. We've invested quite heavily in the HP DL360 G9s, which means that I won't have access to that technology. I would like it if there's a possibility, even if you have to pay an additional license, to enable that technology on the DL360s.

There's never a problem with it. It's always running. The reliability factor's quite high.

It has definitely been stable.

On the 3PAR, you just add devices as needed.

My previous employer, we were an HP house. Then when I started at the new company, I’ve noticed that they’ve got a mixed breed of technologies. It's not all industry or first-year suppliers or brands. I started the standardization strategy and obviously, HPE was the first choice.

The most important criteria when selecting HP were performance and reliability. I've got an existing relationship with a current supplier and, like I've mentioned before, I'm familiar with the brand and the technologies.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Dell and IBM rack servers.

Absolutely HPE. Absolutely happy with it.

This kind of product is mainly a cost product. You need to have a good price. It is not a question of big features because there are no main differences between products.

I think the main feature is that it works. We have good management for the product, HPE OneView, which might be a good feature of the product, where you can manage it. Instead of the hardware technology, that is it.

What we are doing with the product is, we are building services on top of the HPE products, so the main advantage for us is that we have a stable, reliable platform.

I would like to see better license management with the iLO. It is very difficult to manage the licenses for the hardware, as they can easily be lost. Then it is very hard to get it back. That must be better.

We have not experienced any stability problems; 100% stable.

It is a physical thing, so the main scalability issues are money and delivery time, and not the technology itself. It is difficult to evaluate scalability for a simple server. Scalability is determined by the software and we are not talking about Superdome, just a low-level ProLiant server.

If we scale, we buy more machines. No issues so far.

The standard technical support is fine. We also have support with Proactive Support and contact and sometimes you need it, especially for SAP HANA systems where it was average.

The HP ProLiant support was OK.

We have been buying HPE rack servers for years. We are talking every year about switching to another technology, and it depends on the performance and the price at that moment, for one year normally.

When we are looking at a vendor like HPE, the most important criteria are innovation, reliability, and good support.

We also considered Dell rack servers, Lenovo, and Fujitsu. In the end, we chose HPE because of price.

Have a deep look at the HPE products. They are a market leader, by the numbers. Have a look at them; make a thorough comparison.

The iLO. To me, its the differentiating factor of the ProLiant server and the biggest reason I'd choose to run them versus competitors. The iLO provides all the management features needed and is a consistent experience across all form factors, sizes and lines of ProLiant.

The Gen8 and Gen9 hardware provides agentless monitoring and management using the iLO, so we don't have to run agents and rely on software to get hardware alerts. These all come across directly from the iLO. OS level alerts still require agents, but all the basic hardware monitoring does not.

These predate my time with the company. I've been with the company for 10 years and the ProLiant were several generations older, so I would say we had original generation one DL 380s, so it probably goes back at least 15 years.

Very few in recent models. Most any issues are resolved with firmware and driver updates from the HPE Service Pack for ProLiant, their cross-tested bundles. On top of this, HPE has done a lot of address issues for administrators. A couple of generations ago, with the Gen8 ProLiant debut, they hit twenty different improvements that I care about as an administrator. Predictive memory enables us to know when memory is going to fail. Instead of having a hard failure or a crash in the middle of the night, it's got predictive memory so it lets us know when not to pull a drive. So if we're wanting to pull a drive for a fail-back point or something, it's got a little indicator that says "Don't pull me right now". It's got an "X" mark on it, so I don't crash a system just trying to do something preventative, but there was a wealth of different things that they added into the systems that I can appreciate as an operations guy.All of that stuff came directly from feedback of customers like me and got integrated into the next product cycle, so I'm a huge ProLiant fan.

No. You can scale-out with ProLiant, but each generation increases the memory and CPU capabilities exponentially, so from that perspective it's usually just a refresh cycle from scale discussion. But that is kind of how we approach it, is we need to increase capacity within inside of our VMware farms, we replace the hardware with a new generation, generally increase the amount of RAM and CPU configuration.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

They were dead simple. You rack them, power them on, then you can use Intelligent Provisioning to install and configure the system. They just make a lot of sense. It's easy.

I think it's the best server you can possibly buy. I have recently had more exposure to Dell and Cisco products to compare with and I stand by the DL line as the best server and it is primarily because of iLO.

I found HP Virtual Connect (VC) technology to be the most valuable. VC technology simplifies networking configuration for the server administrator using an HP BladeSystem c-Class environment. VC adds a hardware abstraction layer that removes the direct coupling between the LAN and SAN. Hence, it reduces the number of cables required for an enclosure, the number of edge switches, enables direct server-to-server connectivity within the BladeSystem enclosure and more. This feature can significantly reduce the time required to complete a service event.

Without VC, changes to server hardware (for example, replacing the system board during a service event) typically implies changes to the MAC addresses and WWNs. The server administrator must then contact the LAN/SAN administrators, give them the updated addresses, and wait for them to make the appropriate updates to their infrastructure. With VC, a server profile keeps the MAC addresses and WWNs constant, so the server administrator can apply the same networking profile to new hardware. Additionally, VC Flex-10 and VC Flex-20 technology further simplifies network interconnects. Flex-10/Flex-20 technology allows you to split a 10 Gb or 20 Gb Ethernet port into four physical function NICs (called FlexNICs). This feature lets you replace multiple lower-bandwidth NICs with a single 10 Gb or 20 Gb adapter. Prior to Flex-10, a typical server blade enclosure required up to 40 pieces of hardware (32 mezzanine adapters and eight modules) for a full enclosure of 16 virtualized servers. Using HP FlexNICs with Virtual Connect interconnect modules reduces the required hardware by up to 50 percent by consolidating all NIC connections onto two 10 Gb or 20 Gb ports.

As server technology moves forward, I expect HPE server solutions to be compatible with the advancements such as supporting 40+ GbE network adapter and further reducing the complexities in a network topology such as fewer cables, edge switches and simple administration.

This seems to be important to me because in today's competitive environment, the end users expect to have a high-speed SAN network, which majorly depends on the network adapter's speed and performance. In my opinion, the product must support high-speed network adapters in order to meet the customer's expectations.

I've been working on the HP server technology for almost three years now.

I encountered stability issues, particularly with HPE DL-580G8 and DL-360G9 servers. With a network topology similar to be used by an end-user, I encountered server failures such as server freeze, slow booting, and difficulties scanning the LUNs when performing a boot from SAN.

I did not really encounter any scalability issues! I would say the product is quite stable as far as scalability is concerned.

The initial setup (such as network connections) is quite straightforward. The configuration part too is simple, considering that one must know what he/she is doing.

Server technologies nowadays are expensive. Be it HPE, Dell or EMC. In case of large network deployments, nothing can beat HPE Blade Server Technology (with/without VC technology). It provides simple and efficient configuration and administration.

One must be aware of the objectives he/she is expecting. Thorough research about the product and the reviews is always advisable from my end. If it fits in, the user can very well carry on.

They've been stable and we have got good performance out of them.

We have standardized our network on this equipment, so it makes it easy for maintenance, repairs and just standardizing our images.

It works well for us, but they should bring the price down.

We haven't had any problems with the newer equipment. As this stuff ages, things happen.

We cluster them so they scale beautifully with the way we do it.

I'm not impressed as you always go to the first-level support first, and it just takes forever to get to somebody that really can help you. We've already read the manual before we called support, but they read the manual to you again. They are responsive when you actually do get through to someone.

We've used IBM. We got away from IBM just because of the sheer cost for maintenance.

It's very straightforward.

We're strictly HPE at the moment so we haven't looked at anyone else.

I'd encourage them to use it. For the price and the functionality you get out of it, they work out great.