HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The DL380 generation 8 has slots for hard drives in the front. This really separates it from competitors such as Dell. I need that kind of local storage space for each server, which I can make from eight drives. This is like a RAID 6 set-up so that I don't have to worry about just one broken hard drive. We'll automatically get an SNMP problem error from the broken drive.

Very simply, we needed a stable server, and this is a stable server.

I'm worried that with the new model, HP will get rid of the processor ILO port that enables us to have a separated management network. I don't think it'll be feasible to have some models with the ILO port and some without.

I'd also like to see faster memory chips.

I also think that there's an issue with the Smart Array firmware, which is the RAID controller. It corrupts RAID 6 so that if you have an entire setup that's based on RAID 6, the whole RAID will also be corrupted.

We haven't had any deployment issues.

It's quite stable.

I don’t need to scale. Their cage is stand-alone boxes.

I haven't used them for these servers, but I've found them slow for other things.

We were using Dell, which were almost the same as the DL380.

It's straightforward. Putting that kind of server into the rack now is something like 50 minutes.

They are very easy to build and very reliable. On a server, that's the most important thing: reliability. Everything is locked together. They're just nice and quick and easy.

Servers are all about reliability and the HP ProLiant is well priced. You can get other reliable servers, but you're going to pay much more. These are very well priced for what they are.

I find the software for the servers can sometimes be a bit flaky. Upgrades can be flaky, too. For example, you get the HP easy set-up when you want to set up one from scratch. It's not uncommon that when you have to phone HP, they say, "Well you can't use the latest version, go back two versions," or that kind of thing. I would say where they control the servers, that's where they let themselves down. They let themselves down on their software.

They're very stable. With HP servers, you turn them on and you can forget about them. That's why we use them; that's why we like them. Very rarely will HP servers actually go down and give you a hassle.

Scalability depends which ones you buy. They are scalable and you can add to them the whole time. You can add drives and processors. You just have to make sure that the server you buy is scalable because there's no point buying a single processor server if you think one day you might need four processors. You've got to allow for scalability when you buy the server. You've got to be thinking forward.

On the whole, I would say their tech support is quite good. They always come back to you. The only people I can really compare them to in that price range would be Dell. You can't compare as the HP tech support is much, much better than Dell. It's easier to get through and they're more helpful when you actually get them on the phone.

At this price range we've bought Dell and we've bought IBM. We wouldn't go back to either of them. We would, however, go back to HP with no problem. If someone really wants a cheap server, they should go with Fujitsu because it's good value for money. But you can't compare their build quality to HP. HP build quality is much better.

Dell servers are very nice although sales service is diabolical. IBM -- just didn't like the build. Very fiddly, not easy to put together, wasn't intuitive. HP servers -- you get the parts and it's intuitive. You know exactly what you're doing; it's easy. Also, the IBM servers were very, very noisy. With Fujitsu, it just comes down to price.

They're reliable and they never break. They're very manageable. The management tools that are available are excellent. We've looked at other solutions in the past, and we always conclude that we don't want to move away from ProLiant and the BladeSystem. They just work, which is basically what our requirement is.

Particularly in the pre-HP days, with Compaq, we used to buy bigger servers, but we've got to a point now where we basically only buy two types of servers, either the ProLiant DL380 or the BL460 Blades. We don't buy any other hardware.

We're a very small IT group within the enterprise and we haven't got the money or the time to be spending tons of time configuring stuff out and messing around with it, fixing it when it breaks, and that kind of thing. It's a low-maintenance solution. Essentially, we don't have to do much of that with ProLiant, so it's absolutely a good fit for us.

The only improvement would be cost. If they keep driving the costs down -- and I don't think they're expensive for what you're getting -- they'd keep everybody happy.

We've been using HP ever since they were available as Compaq.

We've never had any deployment issues.

We've used them for many, many years and we get very few hardware issues.

It scales just fine.

They're really good. I've never had any issues. The few times that we do have to call HP, they always help us out.

It's quite hard comparing other solutions because I've been solely on ProLiant for so long now I don't have too much to compare to. Although, I looked at Fuji Systems a couple of years ago and it's just massively complex for no apparent reason. I don't see a better fit for our company.

These are very reliable servers with a great warranty. Also, the price was very attractive. We required a complex solution for our organization in terms of hardware, software, and VMware implementations. These servers fit in quite well with our architecture.

A few years ago, we had a project for virtualizing all our servers. We chose HP products, services, and storage, including ProLiant servers, for this project. It worked out very well.

The software doesn't allow you to view isolated hardware issues. This needs to be improved.

We've been using them for more than 10 years.

We have no problems with deployment.

I don't think we've had any issues with stability.

It scales for our needs.

Technical support is very knowledgable.

The flexibility of using storage options would be one valuable feature. Another would be competitive pricing. And yet another would the quite high top speeds on the processor.

It's also the simplicity and user friendliness that's important to us. The only issues we've had were software related from our own side, but not from HP.

The provisioning is something you want to do regardless of the actual types of hardware that you use as you want it as wide as possible.

We use the DL380 mainly for our workloads, so it's a combination of having to use local storage but also having high demands in terms of top speed on processors. We're using the highest top speed possible in a DL380. With that on the local discs, we get lots of performance where other systems will connect to a traditional SAN-based storage.

You would lose speed there, so we use the product for these high workloads, but we also use products like the 380 or the 360 for workloads that are actually offsite. These are like our smaller data centers where we don't have virtualization. These are branch offices or could be used as a domain controller for Windows, those sorts of workloads.

We'd like to have a management platform that's not limited and that would give us a single view of all our systems. This full range of options is limited only to certain types of hardware.

Also, if you look at compatible infrastructure that was introduced recently, it will be like an image streamer in a compatible system. An image streamer won't be able to provision older types of servers.

It's my job to design the infrastructure of the RAM. If there's any operational issue, I would be the one calling HP for that.

We've looked at a lot of IBM systems as well as Lenovo and Dell. We also looked at converged systems like Nutanix.

Look for performance specs. There's a lot of high-end servers being sold in the market with quite low specs.

• Reliability
• Scalability
• Performance

These products are used as corporate infrastructure servers and improve our ability to perform everyday tasks crucial to our business as well as allow for easy administration from an IT perspective.

As these servers are constantly evolving with better technology and performance, I would have nothing to offer in the way of a wish list feature additions.

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

This product was installed prior to my employment, but I have used servers from HP in the past and have always been satisfied with them.

The initial setup was very straightforward with a step-by-step wizard to help me get the servers configured quickly. I’m especially impressed with the RAID setup wizard which makes setup of complex disk pools a breeze.

I implemented one of the servers myself all the way through. The others in our environment were setup by Microsoft prior to my employment

The ROI with these servers if fairly quick. Their reliability and uptime provide a quick return.

I would highly recommend purchasing an HP server product

• Scalability
• Performance
• Out-of-band management
• Support

Java version dependence for its out-of-band management. This is also an issue for other vendors, as well.

HP Proliant Servers have been used on this project for over six years. I’ve managed them since I came on the project, so for almost five years. We used the BladeSystem alongside the DL servers.

There won't be any issues as long as you have followed the guidelines to ensure that the firmware was up to date prior to deployment.

There was an issue before I came on the project, where a firmware update was not applied, and that had caused a few systems to become unstable under certain conditions, but HP support was able to identify the cause and provide a solution.

The systems scale well for our environment.

Mostly very positive. The only issue I’ve encountered has been with presales support (i.e. getting accurate quotes to purchase systems).

Excellent.

Before coming on this project, I had used Dell servers. The performance of the HP server has an edge over the Dell systems I had used.

Overall the HP Proliant servers have been dependable and fit nicely into the price vs performance that is required for custom application stack.

HP Proliant servers are rock solid and when you need technical support HP’s team is there to support you with answers, no matter how long it takes to properly identify the root cause and then propose a solution.

• It helps with work-load management
• It's a reliable solution
• It's easy to fix
• It's easy to work with and manage

I have never implemented them as part of an organization, but I worked with these rack servers while providing support for customers.

During the period of time I was providing tech support for this product line, I was able to see that its fault tolerance is really high, providing the capability of a reaction against a “disaster” and the failure rate is really low.

Obviously, you will still have hardware failures, but it is not something you can easily fix. This is more about the regular hardware failures that you may get on daily basis such as a bad HDD, NIC failure or regular hardware failures that may be present due to the normal workload of the server, meaning that they have or exceeded the lifetime or they are presenting a huge workload.

Regarding the normal functionality of the server as is, the only improvement I would say is to continue with the research and the development of higher workload capacities as the customer needs are constantly growing, therefore the demand for what the product requires to do will also grow, to avoid the demand to elapse behind the improving of the technology needs to be continued. It's tied to the needs of the end users and any new features that they would require in order to better manage their organizations.

I’ve worked with these products for over three years providing technical support for the HP ISS industry customers. I did not need to use them in a production environment.

I was part of the technical support team.

I used to guide customers with the installation, and the initial setup was always straightforward.