HPE Superdome X offers a scalable and reliable platform designed for data-intensive workloads, delivering high performance and robust availability, meeting critical business requirements.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| HPE Superdome X | 6.6% |
| HPE Synergy | 9.2% |
| Dell PowerEdge MX- Series | 9.1% |
| Other | 75.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 2 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 6 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 51 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 30 |
| Large Enterprise | 82 |
HPE Superdome X is engineered to handle demanding environments by providing a flexible infrastructure that supports mission-critical applications. Known for its exceptional scalability and in-memory computing capabilities, it allows organizations to consolidate IT environments efficiently, enhancing operational performance and reliability. The integration of advanced technologies ensures seamless adaptability to ever-evolving business landscapes.
What are its key features?In industries like finance and healthcare, HPE Superdome X is implemented to manage large-scale databases and ERP systems, ensuring real-time processing and integrity of sensitive data. Its robust design aligns with regulatory compliance, supporting critical applications while minimizing downtime risks.
HPE Superdome X was previously known as HP Integrity Superdome, HP Superdome X.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Professor at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | We use the HPE Superdome X in our university for diverse research jobs, appreciating its stability despite energy consumption issues. While reliability isn't crucial due to non-critical applications, more configuration flexibility would enhance its efficiency for our needs. |
| Senior Enterprise System Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees | 4.0 | I value HPE Superdome X for its speed, performance, and resilience in core banking. It's stable, scalable, and setup was easy. While good overall, I believe it needs more cloud capabilities. I rate it 8/10. |
| DGM at Bharat Electronics Limited | 4.0 | I recommend HPE Superdome X for its reliable, scalable, high-availability file server for SAP ERP. While expensive and needing online maintenance, I rate it 8/10, appreciating its straightforward setup and good support. |
| General Director at Xerbit | 5.0 | I rate Superdome X 10/10. It’s an amazing, reliable, standardized product offering superior uptime for enterprise mission-critical applications. Its ability to run standard OS is a key differentiator, making it the way to go. |
| Senior Director of Research at PSC | 5.0 | We value SDX's huge RAM for large-scale genomics and ML, finding stability and support great. I'd like more storage-class memory. It outperformed other large shared-memory solutions, offering excellent value for our demanding workloads. |
| Sales Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | I find the Superdome impressive for its large blade capacity and memory scalability, making it great for analytics. However, I'd like to see more OS support and note its lack of internal disk. |
| Senior Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | Our large HPE machines work well, are stable, and scalable with easy setup. However, I find their technical support terrible, often giving useless advice. I wish they'd test more with Red Hat Linux drivers. |
| Deputy Director of Operations at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees | 5.0 | I find this product offers excellent performance and scalability, handling thousands of concurrent users for our student information system. HPE provides good 24/7 support, and despite minor hardware improvements needed, I recommend it as it works fine. |
| Senior Linux Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees | 4.5 | I find Superdome very stable, scalable, and easy to use for mission-critical, multi-environment needs. It's a great upgrade from c7000. My main suggestion is to add integrated storage, similar to Synergy. |
| CIO at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | We recently deployed HPE's flexible solution, valuing its unique architecture and scaling potential across product lines. While setup was painful and upfront investment high, we expect long-term benefits once in production. |
We are a university. We use this solution for both research activity and teaching activities. Mainly, it's used for running complex research jobs.
We don't use Superdome for specific applications. It's used in a departmental engineering laboratory, so use cases depend on the kind of research we do.
Typically, we virtualize the machine so we can allocate different virtual machines with different operating systems for various purposes. So, the main use case is to run diverse research jobs.
It was a significant improvement in workload management. Previously, we didn't have this kind of machine. Now, with this machine, we're able to run completely new workloads.
So it expanded your horizons in this area. We invest in these technologies precisely to extend our horizons.
We don't run mission-critical applications. However, we did see performance improvements because this product allows us to expand the adoption of modern technologies by different researchers. We invest in these technologies to create a data center that improves our overall research productivity output. So these technologies definitely contribute to that improvement.
I like the robustness of the machine. Similar performance could likely be achieved with other configurations, but this machine is very stable.
While reliability is important, it's not crucial for us since we're not running mission-critical applications.
We use it for data management, specifically for large-scale data management and applications.
We use this machine to create a Superdome with powerful data processing and machine learning capabilities on other dedicated machines. These Superdome machines focus on data processing and improve data management for us.
In this specific model, it could be beneficial to have a server configuration similar to Cisco, like the kind offered in HPE Superdome Flex X280. The ability to separate the chassis is important because we are forced to use two chassis even with lower loads.
So introducing more flexibility in the Superdome environment would be helpful.
One other problem is energy consumption. We are forced to use both chassis even when we only need, for example, all four processors. It's not always used at full capacity every day.
When underutilized, we still need to have both chassis powered, which creates an energy consumption issue.
While the machine can be configured to reduce consumption, the idea of having different possible configurations with varying chassis usage, similar to the Flex version, could be interesting for this model, too.
This model leverages specific features of the Intel MAP board, so switching like in the Flex might be difficult due to the motherboard switching involved.
We use the Superdome machine. It's a very good machine. We have a lot of technologies from HPE and are likely buying more in the next month.
The model we use is an HPE Superdome Flex 280.
It is very stable. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.
We chose this machine for its scalability features. This model, the Superdome Flex 280, has limits in terms of scaling, but we are interested in potentially upgrading memory if needed. This will depend on the machine's usage. If our research applications become more complex, we'll need to extend memory support.
I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten because the issue is we can't add more chassis and I'm aware of that limitation. This specific model is limited to two chassis.
Our configuration already has the maximum equipment – eight processors. So, memory is the only way we can scale further.
If I compare this machine's scalability to other servers, it offers better scalability as a single machine. However, we could also scale by buying additional machines or creating a cluster. So, for a single machine, the scalability is good, albeit with limits for this specific model.
The machine is dedicated to a very complex job, so most CPUs are allocated to that. Currently, only two of my colleagues are using it.
We are experimenting with this machine for different jobs. We plan to make it available for other use cases in our department. So, different research groups will use it in the future.
We have other HPE products with support agreements. Not for this specific machine.
Configuration is quite easy to use, and the remote access/configuration tools are available.
I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy to set up.
We bought the machines from HPE, without the software. Since we work on these aspects, our interest is also in the hardware configuration.
I handled most of the configurations along with my collaborators. It took us about a week to understand how it works, install the operations system, and get it ready to use.
Our deployment process, in order to have the machine usable, involved the following:
For the kind of maintenance we perform internally in our department, typically two people are enough.
The pricing is not very cheap. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being very inexpensive, and ten being very expensive.
This product is quite specialized, so we didn't evaluate other options in this case. It is a very unique proposition by HPE.
However, we use a lot of products from HPE in general. We have other HPE products. We have DL380 machines, HPE ProLiant DL385s, and models 160 and 360 in our environment.
We have a range of HPE machines.
I would recommend using it. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.
HPE Superdome X is used in my data center for our core banking application.
The most valuable features of HPE Superdome X are speed, performance, and resilience.
HPE Superdome X can improve by adding a lot of cloud capabilities to allow this solution to be cloud-ready in case the customer wants to move it to the cloud.
I have been using HPE Superdome X for approximately five years.
HPE Superdome X is highly stable.
The scalability of HPE Superdome X is very good. It's easily scalable. We can scale it on the fly without having any downside. It's very agile.
Our IT department of approximately six people using this solution. We do not have plans to increase usage at this time.
The support from HPE Superdome X is good but it could improve.
I rate the support from HPE Superdome X a four out of five.
I have previously used IBM. We switched to HPE Superdome X because some applications could not run on IBM.
The initial setup of HPE Superdome X was very straightforward. It took us a month to set it up and bring it to an application-ready stage.
I rate the setup difficulty of HPE Superdome X a two out of five.
We used the vendor partner to do the implementation of HPE Superdome X.
I have evaluated other solutions and HPE Superdome X is very good compared to the competitors.
HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable. We've been able to achieve 99.999 percent availability.
I rate HPE Superdome X an eight out of ten.
This product is a file server and we use it to host SAP ERP.
The most valuable feature is the high availability.
The price of this product should be cheaper.
It would be helpful if you could do the maintenance completely online.
I have been working with HPE Superdome X for several years, since 2013.
This product is very reliable.
This is a scalable solution. We have approximately 10,000 users. We don't plan on expanding our usage at this time.
We have a dedicated account support manager and we are satisfied with the technical support.
The installation process is very straightforward. It took four days to complete the deployment. We needed eight engineers to complete it.
We used an integrator to assist with our implementation.
There is a very expensive one-time cost with no licensing fees.
In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Availability. Basically it's availability, in a product that can handle the workload. It has features that will give the most uptime possible for applications.
Reliability.
Stability is the point. It's a product that will give you better uptime compared to traditional servers. It has features for making it that way.
It's basically for large business, enterprise. You look at the scaleof big databases that are the core of the business, for example, for core banking or a billing system in a telco company. A SAP implementation. That's the kind of application.
It's very nice. They pay a lot of attention, obviously, to this kind of implementation. The customer that buys Superdome is a very valuable client, so they pay special attention, normally.
Superdome X is a system that can compete in terms of performance and uptime, but it's now standard. That is the great value. There are competitors like IBM, for example, but IBM has a propietary operating system. With Superdome X, you have a system that can run Windows, Red Hat, or VMware which are standard applications and operating systems, but in a mission critical server.
I've been working with this product since the first version, the Superdome, the original one that was based on Itanium HP-UX. Basically, it was based on a RISC processor and HP-UX; then the Superdome 2 and now Superdome X. And I'm willing to work with the new Superdome Flex.
The way that the product itself evolved is making it more standard. So the Superdome X, and now the Superdome Flex, make it x86-compatible so you can deploy standard applications. It's not a proprietary system, but it has all the features that it had in the legacy systems, like the original Superdome or other similar product from the competitors.
In terms of how I rate it, you're putting the "sales" hat on me. I rate it a 10 out of 10. It's an amazing product, an amazing technology, that has the best of that world: performance and uptime, and standardization. So I believe that is the way to go for enterprise customers.
SDX gave us a very large RAM and we need that for the large-scale graph-handling applications. Those turn up in genomics for genome sequence assembly and in metagenomics. Now, people are even doing things like metatranscriptomics and those algorithms and applications right now require a very large RAM. They're not distributed, at least, not for what the biologists are commonly using in the field; we need it for that. We, also, need it for some machine-learning and large-scale Java workflows that also don't distribute.
Benefits of the SDX, to me, are having a very large RAM. We chose 12 terabytes as the sweet spot. We could have gone higher with the higher-density dims and a very high bandwidth backplane, i.e., connecting the blades into the ccNUMA architecture.
This is just my wild speculation, I'd like to see the onboarding of some storage class memory to really expand the already very large RAM, into something that could be even much bigger. This could really help in solving the problem of when you want to do work on a node that's 12 terabytes of RAM and getting the data on/off can be a limiting factor. Thus, having a richer storage hierarchy within the node could actually have some interesting capabilities.
Stability has been great, the systems are very solid.
We have been running applications on the individual Superdome X nodes. For us, those are a scale-up solution. We build them with a very large RAM, so they gave us the scale that we needed.
We may have made a couple of calls to the support team for over the year and half that they've been running. The technical support has been consistently good.
Previously, we had run the world's largest shared-memory machine. It was called Blacklight which was based on the SGI UV. Also, it was really productive and great for science; it was fantastic for science and that is why we want a large shared-memory again. With Bridges, we essentially expanded our large shared-memory capacity by 50 percent. Today, a lot more of that research should be done.
The setup was reasonably straightforward. We were bringing these in when Omni-Path was a very new product, and that made it a little bit challenging on the Superdome X. But other than that, if you want to do other interconnects, it would be extremely straightforward.
We did look at other solutions. However, there are not many vendors in the large shared-memory space, but we did look into the other one or two that were out there. We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group.
Selecting a vendor really comes down to:
For large workloads, i.e., the large member workloads, the HPE Superdomes are really interesting. We're also having people look at them for very novel applications of Spark using a very large RAM. That's a work-in-process, but I think, that it will be interesting to follow that as well.
It's big. One of the really cool things about Superdome is, depending on the model you choose, you can put 8-16 blades in it, but because of the structure and the engineering behind it, you can actually have your blades partitioned and they're actually physically divided. You can view it as a separate server and I think that's pretty cool, and the fact that it can scale up.
It always comes down to OS. I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported.
There's no internal disk, so you would have to add your disks, but you can add memory. You can scale up to a ton of memory, which it's great for data warehousing, great for business analytics, and great for a lot of that stuff.
I think if you're someone who does a lot of analytics, a lot of data warehousing where you just need space, it's the way to go.
We've got a few of them, because we needed some really large machines. So far, they've been working pretty good.
What would make it better from my point of view is if HPE spent more time on testing with the actual built-in Red Hat Linux drivers, as opposed to always trying to say, "Use our driver."
The stability is pretty good.
It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling; application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.
The technical support sucks, would be understating it. Because the first line and the second line support tend to give out stupid suggestions that are completely useless, and they aren't listening to anything. It takes a lot of time to get through them, and that is every call I've been on with them. Oftentimes, I've got a very low expectation of HPE, and they go below my expectation a few times.
Initial setup was relatively straightforward.
We have some IBM machines, but we're mostly an HPE shop. I believe the only reason we bought the IBM was because at the time HPE didn't have the feature we needed.
The performance and scalability.
We put a system on this which has a student information system which has attendance, grading, and all student information. We have 35,000 teachers which at least five to six thousand concurrent users there. You need a high performance machine to support that kind of concurrency. CPU and memory, it's just pretty good and helps us to support the students and the teachers of the school.
Hardware is hardware, there might be an issue with memory they have to replace memory or something but nothing major. There is some reporting that we will probably want to use it for on our next projects. We also use this for our major databases but we don't virtualize it.
We can buy two, three, or four depending on our admin, and we can just expand it. It's pretty good.
Our team was involved and HPE helped us in the original implementation because it's a new product. They racked, stacked, installed it for us. In the beginning, HPE helped us with the installation of Windows 2012. The second time around when we purchased a second we installed it right ourselves on Oracle as we're pretty familiar with it now.
I recommend it because it's a fact, we use it and it's working fine.
It is meant for mission-critical applications. It allows you to partition your blades, basically, and also combine multiple blades together, to increase the capacity and efficiency of the blades. It's very easy to use, because we already have an older version, called c7000 series. Superdome is basically an upscale, and we have the c7000. It's very easy to use.
We can use it for development, production, and a the same time, using different blades. All in one inclusion.
I know HPE has another product, called Synergy, which is similar to Superdome, but I would think, if they can add maybe storage, even if it's a mini-set of storage to each, which can be used externally, they should do it.
So far it's very stable. It's a very stable product, and I think it's going to go a long way.
It's very scalable. You can change the blades, you can increase the capacity of it. You can operate the blades and the CPU. Even though it's usable with v2, v3, you can upgrade it to v4 Intel.
I've not really used technical support for Superdome, but HPE technical support is always very good.
Previously, we had a c7000, which we currently use also, which we have also. That's why we moved up to Superdome, because it's been a very good product.
It's very straightforward. Being the fact that I had experience with c7000, and that's what made it so straightforward. It's very similar to c7000, so doing that, it's pretty straightforward.
We have other products that looks similar to Superdome, from IBM. IBM Flex Chassis. We chose HPE because of our experience with c7000.
I would tell you that if you are looking for a product that can be used by multiple groups especially multiple groups with one point of administration, Superdome is very good. You have eight blades inside that can be used by multiple groups. Even if you want to partition one of the blades for production, it's always available. You have one central point of administration, as a whole. It's a very good product.
We just recently deployed it. We like the flexibility with the platform and our ability to stretch it across a lot of different areas of the company and product lines. For us it's ability to easily write, scale up and down remains to be seen.
There's a big upfront investment, but the total cost of ownership should be cheaper over the long term.
It's been stable, but again it's not yet in production.
Nothing is in production yet, we just deployed it four weeks ago. We're still in the setup phase. It will go in production in the next coming month.
We've used IBM and Dell in various phases of our history in our Blade Server center. Nothing on the same scale as Superdome.
It's relatively OK, but setup is always painful. I'm a CIO so I have a lot of people that work for me. The ones in the data center, I'm sure they hit some hurdles, they always do, but they made it work. They seemed to work through it, so at the end of the day it got done within the time frame.
HPE came in and set it up for us in our data centers.
We run a lot of environments for various products, some on OpenStacks, some on VMware, some on Windows, some on CentOS. We were looking for something that could scale and grow as we need it to across different product lines. We looked at traditional BladeCenters, and although this was a bigger investment upfront, over the longer term we felt it would scale and grow with us better.
There's a different architecture behind it from a BladeSystem. It's unique in that regard, that's why we chose it.
