HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

I've been using HP for quite a few years, so my knowledge base of HP products is good. We like to standardize on them. We also have good relationships with HP vendors. That's the reason why we've been going with the HP ProLiants.

I really like the way we can do the storage in cells, for putting operating systems on them. The redundancy, as far as power supplies, hard drives, etc. Ease of use is key.

The business benefits - if we stick to one brand, you don't have to have as much people, as far as knowing different brands and stuff like that. 

Reliability - so we don't have to keep repairing them, we don't have downtime, which is key. Most of our plants are 24/7, so we've got to make sure that we don't have downtime. We used them in a Hyper-V environment, that adds in the uptime, as well.

Serial number tracking and trying to get that tied to my account. I have a terrible time with that with HP. I've got hundreds of servers around the country, and when I try to call in and keep the serial numbers straight and things like that. When I try to download drivers for them, the serial number doesn't come up, even though it's under extended coverage. I've not been happy with that part.

Reliability was the reason why we've had them for so many years - they've been reliable.

 The pricing has been good on them.

Dell was the primary competitor. We do have some plants that have Dell systems, but we probably are 90 - 95% HP, as far as company-wide. We've just been happy with the product, and there's not been a business reason to switch.

For me, they key things are reliability, and ease of use. Then the pricing's good as well.

They're reliable. They work and I'm familiar with them. The iLO has been a solid out-of-band management tool for us, in comparison to some other out-of-bands that I've had to deal with. The performance out of the box, the stability of the servers, HPE's turnaround for support, and resolving issues.

The new rail kits are terrible. The older rail kits were great and simple. It took one person to do it. Now the new rail kits for the DL line, since the Gen-8s, are terrible. It takes more than one person to be there present in order to rack one of those systems without endangering yourself or the server by letting it fall to the ground. The older rail kits were great, the new ones are horrible.

Very seldom do we have problems with the hardware. If we do, it's a grand module that went bad or something that went bad, or a hard drive that failed, but otherwise the system boards themselves rarely give us a hard time and it's good for production.

If we need more, we buy more, and put more in. It's all the whether we have one or five thousand.

Technical support was good.

Primarily, my organization has been a ProLiant job since I've been there. Prior to that, I wasn't in this industry to have alternate experiences.

The Gen8's and previous were pretty easy going. We just received Apollo 2000s that we're trying to deploy to now, and getting over the humps of learning the new UEFI deployment which is kind of mandatory. It pushed us over the edge from legacy bios mode to UEFI, so we've got some lessons to learn in our organization to deal with that change with the new Gen9's.

HPE seemingly always wins the cost-to-benefit ratio for performance.

If we were to move away from using Proliants and HP, I think I'd be disappointed. I've had nothing but good experiences really, racking stacking and deploying to ProLiants. Based on my track record I would say that's probably a pretty good path to go down.

We like the reliability of the server. We also like the iLO abilities of the server ... that's what my guys like the most.

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.

I think maybe just improving the manageability since we would like a single pane of glass. I think there may be a few features that my team might want to see added. We use it a lot for VMware so anymore things that they can tightly integrate with VMware would be great.

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.

The Dell servers were four to five years old. They were already getting close to end of life and end of support, so it was time to upgrade.

It was straightforward. At the time, we were a very small shop. I think we replaced six Dell servers that were there at the time with six ProLiants. Since then, our company has grown tenfold. Now we still have a few of the rack mount ProLiant’s but we have six blade chassis that we're now using.

I left my position as a system engineer at HPE into this company, and I knew the ProLiants inside and out. That was the selling point right there, and we didn't look at anything else.

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.

I like their scalability. The fact that where I have 24 drives in one of my servers, I can basically turn it into its own little storage tray if I want to, and then attach a server to it. It's really good for applications that you use really heavy disk IO.

For us, we use the DLs more on a piece by piece basis, so when our clients come to us with a very specific demand that really doesn't fit well with our blades, which is our preference, then we go to the DLs, and then we scale it out for whatever they need.

I'm not a fan of their rails. I hate how those things rack, as they're just not nice.

The server itself is quite good, easy to use. Configuration of it is a little bit tedious, you've got to be willing to spend a couple of hours just to get it set up before you can even start using it, because the reboots are ten - fifteen minutes long, and that'll kill you.

The cost per compute. I pay as much for a ProLiant DL as I do for a Blade. It requires more power, more cooling, more space for essentially the same function, if I wanted to, with the exception of additional storage. So for me it really does come down to cost.

We haven't looked at competitors in a very long time for those. We basically have stuck with HPE. It's a known name, so I don't want to give my customers something that might work, I want something that will work.

Get on it with OneView, because it's that single pane of glass, you can manage your blades, your DLs, and your 3PAR, all using that one tool.

I think the high availability features that are built into the server as our systems require a certain amount of uptime. Having to buy less servers because of built-in redundancy, means I have to buy less pieces of iron. It's a line that I'm comfortable with. I think it's something that HPE has put the investment into for the long-term.

I think it's just the generations that are built on the ProLiant line of servers.

The biggest thing I don't like about ProLiant, and this will be very trivial, is the rails. Every generation, even within the same family generation, the rails are different. It's a pet peeve. It’s not a technical thing. We do rack-mounted servers. Having to deal with different rack - or rail kits - is a real pain. It's not a huge technical thing, but that's the biggest thing for me.

For us it’s been a success year after year, generation after generation. I've used ProLiant for 15 -16 years.

Really none. Again, that may be just familiar with the tools from its initial iterations.

Really none. Again, that may be just familiar with the tools from its initial iterations.

I've never had a problem with support, and dealing with HP is always seamless.

The setup is so easy. It used to be SmartStart, but now they've changed that whole functionality. It's seamless to us. I don't really have any complaints from a "stand-it-up-and-support-it" perspective.

We looked at Dell versus HP. Proliant versus the R-series on the Dell side. When you look at product to product, servers are fairly closely matched. The supportability, or the management of the HP, versus bringing in Dell into my shop was a cost, from an educational perspective for my staff. Understanding the product inside and out was more important than bringing in a new partner.

I rate the ProLiant line very highly because you see the commitment of them building on it, and to me that's important.

The nice thing that we have with the whole ProLiant platform is there's a lot of commonality among the platform. We buy enough servers such that we always have spare parts on hand. When we do need spare parts, HPE is quick to provide them to us. Likewise, when we have issues that require more technical support, the support from HPE has been pretty top notch.

The way that we have used the ProLiant platform within our business, being that it's such a widespread usage, it gives us the capability to develop in-house expertise with those systems, provide assistance to our 300+ divisions when they have issues with either their system or they need some sort of help internally. We have the capability and the knowledge to reach out to them from a global IT team.

I would say that it would be nice if there was a more streamlined approach to getting drivers or looking up system information from HPE's website. That's the one thing that I did appreciate on the Dell side, you put in a serial number, you see the exact build, you see all the drivers associated with that machine. That is probably the only thing that I see missing from the HPE side is a very easy to use method to get this. It does exist, there is a method to get the information, but it's not as streamlined.

I want to say if we've had any issues with stability, there's always going to be issues that servers encounter. The nice thing with the ProLiant series is that you also get alerting as to the health of the system. That has helped us to stave off any issues with those servers or services because we are able to get a transition to another host or we're able to repair it within a timely window before it goes bad.

Everything is scaled out exactly how we always anticipated it to.

We have used it a couple of times over the last year. We had an issue with some disk platform extensions on a number of ProLiant servers. HPE was able to quickly diagnose the issue and get us back up and running.

Within our IT group, we do have some older HP UX Blade infrastructure. We do have some other platforms such as Cisco's Unified System. Not much else besides that.

Initially within my company's IT space, I was not involved with the initial decision to go with ProLiant. I'll be honest, I came from a Dell background. The division that I had worked for prior to our globalization in our IT group was primarily Dell. There have been a number of elements to using HP's that have been more beneficial from my point of view.

I always have colleagues who are looking to implement new servers within their divisions. As part of my responsibility, I am the conduit by which divisions can seek out additional assistance for getting servers. I am in that space a lot. I typically go over the benefits that we see within our global IT group and explain to them the efficiencies that can be seen by going to the ProLiant platform. Showing how the system can provide good alerting, good stability, and explaining that within the global IT group, if they have additional concerns or needs, that we can support them because we use the platform.

We've got a whole lot of DL380's which are the standard 2U server. We've been switching more over to the blades using the BL460's. But, the ProLiant line all along just works, they're tanks. About the only thing we've ever had to fix is drives that go bad after a while, but usually that mostly happened after a heat incident. They just run. We've got some that have been out of warranty for four - five years and they're still running. G4s we go back to and love we have no reason to change.

For certain applications that we have to have for external connectivity it runs great. Our main security system has one of these little USB dongles that starts off the back end, I could make it on the blade, but then it'd block up one blade, so having a DL380 is great for us. It does everything we ever need.

I think we started buying HP servers ten years ago, and we've got a couple that may have been from that time that are still working. They're running great. Now we're not running it really heavy, but it's solid. I still like the 3.5 inch drives better than the 2.5 inch drives. They seem to last longer. Other than that, we've been very stable, very solid. You don't have to worry about, "Hey, is my server down today?"

ProLiant's a little tough. We realized that the other day, that we were running out of space on our C: drive. It's like, I can't just add to a physical drive. We ended up having to move that thing, making it a physical to virtual conversion. As far as other parts, if we need more storage on it, you can always add RAM. For the most part with the ProLiants, we generally buy it for a certain purpose and that's what it does so we don't have to do as much. On the SANs, we can always add an extra node, they'll allow you to connect that way. If we need to get larger, we can.

Most of them, we don't really have any issues there, but if you lose a drive and it's still on warranty, we get one. It works.

We were using Dell. Dell was the state recommended choice. Everybody said, "Oh, you got to buy Dell because we've got a relationship with them." They got my boss really mad over some stupid stuff. It was like two-hundred dollar set of rails, and so we said, "Okay, let's try HP's." We loved the first one, and we've been buying them, and Dell has been trying to get back in the door ever since and we just tell them to go away. It's like, "No, I'm not fixing what isn't broken. This works great, so we don't care what you've got."

We've been doing the ProLiants forever. It's getting a little tougher now. It used to be, you had everything on a CD or DVD, you pop that in, you run. Or you had the SmartStart disk. Now, you got their onboard administrator. They got the intelligent deployment guide or whatever the heck it's called. Sometimes it's a little less intuitive. Sometimes it's where technology can bite you, and it might be helpful to have a guy go on and say "Do this." Otherwise you pull it out of the box and go, "Okay, now what do I do?" We work through it, but some of my techs have had a little bit of trouble. I gave them a new server and said,"Deploy it.", and they're like "Well, how do I put an OS on it?" It took us a little while to figure that out. I know that somebody's thinking, "Hey, this is really great. It's all here, it's all inside." Great, some of us need a little more direction sometimes.

I think we looked around, but really it was Dell servers or HPs were about all that we had considered. Since we weren't going to buy Dell anymore, we said, "Well, we want to go with HP." We were never going to be one of those, "I'm going to go buy parts and make something." And, I know some guys do that and it's great, but we like to have at least the ability to go call somebody to get somebody to come and help. That's been probably chief on why we did that.

We've been extremely happy all along. I don't see a reason to go anywhere else. I don't see a reason to even try different things. For us right now getting adventurous is we bought a DL360 instead of a 380 and it's like, wow, that's a little small.

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.