HPE Synergy Reviews

My primary use case was to familiarize myself with this new HPE product because I know it is a replacement for the old C7000 chassis, so for me it was interesting to see the new features, to know the product as a whole.

Everything is combined in one chassis, you have storage, compute, networking. So you save a lot of space in the datacenter.

The most valuable is the OneView interface. You can do all the management steps you need to do to configure it, and you can see everything for management, for error reporting, monitoring, etc.

I don't know because this was the first time I've seen this product and I'm not very familiar with it. I need some time to work on it, to play with it.

I cannot say. I would need to test it in a proper environment.

From what I've tested, it looks scalable.

We are very pleased with the support of HPE.

We used other HPE products.

It was easy to follow the guides. It was straightforward.

The most important criteria for me, when selecting a vendor, is support.

I would tell others to give it a try.

Primary use case is for Oracle Servers to store a large database.

Right now the performance is good, but we have only had the solution installed in production for two months.

First of all, it's new hardware. So everybody noticed very large improvement in data processing. A lot of activity which took hours now takes, let's say, tens of minutes. So it's a very visible improvement in quality.

I think the ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

When templates are created, there are some steps where you need to reboot the machines. Being in production, this is not a good idea. For example, if you reconfigure the network, you should not have to reboot the machine. You should just apply the new template and that's it.

Right now, it's stable. But we have only had it for five months, three months in proof of concept and two months in production. But we haven't have any issues up until now.

No issues.

We haven't had to call them. HPE installed it, that was about it. We have been able to manage it very easily since.

We had some old generation servers, we needed to replace them. This was the newest technology, so we went with the newest technology.

Also, we have been working with HPE for a long, long time. So we just stuck with what we know.

I think we needed HPE only for the hardware install. After that, I don't think we really needed them.

I give it an eight out of 10, because of the rebooting issue I mentioned above.

It's worth acquiring this if you have a larger datacenter, or if you have a lot of operations being done on a daily basis. These are the main reasons why you should take this approach.

Internally, we use it for VSAN as well as Docker, with the flexibility to flop between the two solutions at will. We also demonstrate the solution for multiple customers.

Performance is fantastic.

The big benefit that we are seeing is the fact that we are so highly flexible. It makes things more agile. We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry.

• The composable infrastructure with the Image Streamer.
• Being able to seamlessly migrate from one operating environment to another within minutes, is invaluable.

I'm very curious to see what comes with 4.0.

The big thing will be streamlining the Image Streamer process for deployment. The actual frame itself - Composer, OneView, all that - works fantastic. The more granular permissions that I know are coming are great. That answered a lot of our big questions and big customer demand. 

Now it's about the flexibility and the simplicity of using the product day to day and getting new features stood up as customer demands come forward. I'm not sure exactly what I want next but I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

Stability is fantastic at this point. I think it's come a long way. I think with the latest versions, especially the new version coming out in December, it's been fantastic and we're looking forward to it.

The scalability is fantastic. It goes from a relatively small size to as large as you want it to go. I've yet to find a customer that couldn't use Synergy to scale to their needs.

I've used tech support extensively. They've been fantastic with the solution so far. I've been engaged on several support calls as we stood up our frame and got things going. We ran into some issues that were very unique, to say the least. We were engaged with support within minutes, case was resolved quickly, we were escalated when we needed to be escalated, and everything was seamless. I mean it was, overall, a great experience.

It has gotten better. The initial setup we did was on 3.0 and that was overly complex. With 3.10, everything's been changed, revolutionized, the guided setup made things a breeze. I've been able to walk colleagues of mine through it. I'm able to demonstrate to customers how easy it is to set the frame up and get things going right out of the box. That's been an incredible change.

We've gotten enough training that we're able to set the product up for our customers and walk customers through it without the need for having HPE expertise on site. Worse case scenario, they're a phone call away, but it's been so simple to use, it's been fantastic.

For us, when selecting a vendor,

• Simplicity is a big factor. We've got a very broad range of customers, including ourselves.
• We're looking at what is fast, what is simple, does performance and value meet those expectations? 
• We're looking for stuff where there's not a whole lot of, I don't want to say hands-on, but where there's not a lot of need to be nitty-gritty to get things going quickly.
• The ability to customize things for our customers' environments is great.

Those are all the features we're looking for when we're looking for our partner. We evaluate, obviously, agnostic across the board, as a partner. So we're constantly evaluating HPE versus Dell versus Cisco, and time and time again HPE wins that battle because of the simplicity; because of the feature-rich environment. They're just leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else.

I would give it an eight out of 10 overall. It is a great solution. Obviously, we had a few stumbles. We still get a lot of questions of "Why Synergy versus the current generation products?" Some of those things aren't always apparent. I do know that with things coming down the road, with Photonics and the like, it's going to alleviate a lot of other things. It's a solution that's most of the way there. I'm looking forward to seeing it get across the finish line to be the all encompassing datacenter solution for our customers.

There's no other solution that's similar. This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market. If you're researching this, you're going down the right path. The best thing to do is actually get hands-on and get a demo. Contact HPE and start taking a look at the advance features and start looking at how your applications and demands are going to be met and how you want to customize your experience going forward.

I believe, compared to the C7000, which is the mainstream in Brazil, it delivers a significant amount of innovation and flexibility, and I think people there will love it. The way Brazilians see things is that, "Okay, I need something that works. I need something easy to manage, because it's expensive, manpower is expensive. And I need a reliable platform, which is easily managed, so everybody can understand and use it with ease, with no problems, and that delivers value to their business.

I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame. I understand why you cannot present storage to compute nodes on other frames, but that is a question that sometimes I get from customers. Why not? I say, "Okay, you have to have a cable running over and have another SAN switch on the second frame. It will not be easy. I don't know if HPE is satisfied with this approach. They're saying, "Okay, let's stick with the drawer presenting volumes within the same frame." But the satellite architecture it's incredible. It was very well thought out. 

And the management ring, I think it's also great. 

These advancements - regardless of the advancements on chips, on more memory, addressing, computing, etc., customers expect that - but with this architecture of the management rings, this is really nice. This is a very nice idea. 

The Image Streamer, I see the value of it. Hopefully, customers will see the value of it, but I don't expect many Brazilians deploying Image Streamers, because they don't have this culture.

OneView, as a single point, a single management tool, it makes me delirious. It's really nice. People developing using the API for OneView, I don't see it too much. Brazilians are still at the beginning of this idea of consuming IT as a service. Their approach is, "Okay, I have all the APIs exposed and I can program my own Chef recipe and simple recipe and use and orchestrate Synergy the way I want." They are still in the early stages of this, but maybe it will gain traction in the future.

I rate Synergy a nine out of 10 because there's no perfection. But I think that in terms of the proposition of the product, what the product wants to achieve, they really achieved it. I was at the booth (at the Discover conference in Madrid) on the next generation of Synergy and I talked to an engineer. I asked what has changed? He said we changed some specs, etc. We delivered the Image Streamer composing Windows machines, we put the VC with an extra gig, etc. It was expected. It is a minor advance, in my opinion. This is not bad, this is good. This means they met their criteria, the whole criteria, in the initial launch of the product, so there is nothing to evolve into, all of a sudden.

So, to really evolve the product from where it is right now, it will take time. That means the product was very well conceived, they mostly meet their goals for the product. The next generation, let's say the ServerSpec for Windows, it's just minor stuff, but we expected it, so this is a very good sign. It's a very mature product from the start.

What I would like to see is a little bit more of architecture-oriented advertising campaigns or events for customers; not on the product itself, but more on the way they advertise products. They are too focused on the features. This is okay, but sometimes what I see that people lack is, "Okay, I understood the features, but how can I use this in practical terms? How can I put my Oracle in there? How can I use it for a VDI? Can I architect a huge SQL cluster with it, and what would be the best way to do that?"

I think that the documentation says that, but I don't see any events. I don't see any advertising in those terms.

In the end, it's more like they are giving the components, but they are not showing what you can do with the components. You can see you have all this, but what can I do from this? Can I make a cake out of it, or I can do an omelet? I can, but how? That's the missing link. They need to give me some ideas on how I can use this in such a way that I achieve my goals. This is the only thing that I really think the product lacks, a little bit more consumer-focused mindset. 

When you are talking about the product, talking only about features is good for me, for the partner, because I understand how to use the features to make the cake, but they don't.

It varies from area to area. From the storage guys, I get very strong support. They are very sympathetic guys, good knowledge. They are very smart people and they are really willing to help. 

From the networking guys, so-so. I don't know exactly why, but they leave you a little bit, let's say, on your own. But, in that area, the HPE documentation is very good. So you don't have to fall back to support often. 

Servers, I don't really need support, because you can find your way around. 

But with other stuff, software stuff especially, say Data Protector - now it's Micro Focus - it was a total nightmare. 

So, it varies from area to area and I can see within HPE they have different approaches in different areas. The storage guys are more like a family. They work together, they are committed together. The networking guys, they are more "I'm a self-made man, so it's me, it's him," it's not us. I feel that more or less. And servers, it's okay: "What do you need, give me a yell. I'll help you with that." Simplivity, I haven't had any experience with Simplivity as of yet. So, I can't tell you anything about it. 

But for Synergy, the Synergy guys, they are very good, really supportive.

In Brazil, they have a culture of reusing things, they don't like to dispose of a server every three years or so. I know in Europe and United States, a refresh cycle of three years is absolutely normal and they are ready to scrap their G7, scrap their G8, and get the G9. But in Brazil you can find G5 easily, G5 and G6. They have this culture of extending the lifetime of the product as much as they can or until it breaks.

With Simplivity, I think that we can address that very nicely, because as you can expand, it's the latest technology and you can put so many things in it. You can put storage, it can present every compute node, you can support satellites and expand the chassis. I believe that this will address this behavior that the Brazilians have and they'll say, "Okay, so I can invest in this platform now and believe that seven years from now, it will be the same. I will still be able to put hardware on it, I can still use it." And that will create fidelity from them for HPE.

The only driver, I cannot state this strongly enough, the only driver that I face when with I'm a customer, and I meet Dell or I meet Lenovo there, is money. They like them because they're cheaper.

I have never heard a customer saying HPE has a better product. I have never heard anybody say a Dell server is better than an HPE server; a Lenovo server is better than an HPE server. I always hear them say it's cheaper. This is what compels them to buy Dell, on whichever level, whether it's networking, storage, servers.

I just took my certification in Synergy. I was one of the first technicians in Brazil who qualified for Synergy. The main driver for me to take the certification for this platform is because I deem Synergy like an evolutionary platform rather than revolutionary. I think the machine will be the revolution, but Synergy is an evolutionary platform.

HPE is really the leading platform. I heard once that HPE is a company that is run by engineers. And engineers are passionate about it. Dell doesn't create things. Dell just manufactures things. That's why I love HPE technology so much, because I understand that HPE is really about engineering stuff and creating stuff and doing it better. Dell, they are just getting parts somewhere. They are assembling it, and they are selling it cheaper. 

That's why I really love HPE and I'm a strong partner. There's a strong partnership with HPE and I don't see leaving it anytime in the future. I come to the HPE Discover conference very often, attended the last Discover in Las Vegas. I'm attending this one in Madrid, and every time, the same: My commitment with HPE gets stronger and stronger and I really love the technology.

We're doing a new product line, we're now doing Big Data. We had the help of HPE on it. They advised we use this platform, so that's why we have it.

Shorter delivery times. Where we now have a delivery time of about six weeks, we hope to go back to days.

It's a bit easier to manage than the C7000s. But we're still finding out how it works, it's all new to us. And we're also using it for new concepts, the old systems we used were ESX. And these systems are used for Mesosphere and bare metal Red Hat deployments.

The deployment time of a system through OneView is pretty slow, but apparently that's being addressed in an upcoming update.

Also not a big point. It's stable, but all the other solutions we have are stable as well, so this is not a main point.

The other solutions that we have are scalable as well. At least they are scalable enough for our needs.

Good, very good. As far as we have a need for them, they are knowledgeable.

It was pretty complex. We weren't allowed to do the setup ourselves, we had to have an engineer from HPE. In my book, that's complex, if I cannot do it myself.

As far as I know, the traditional blade system is not going to be supported from 2023. So we are trying to anticipate the need for this change towards Synergy, and perhaps moving a little bit early.

• They're easy to swap and move around the datacenter, for sure. 
• They don't occupy too much space for what they offer.

The structure is different yet similar because it resembles the traditional approach of blade systems. Perhaps it's more composable, you can use storage as well as compute blades. So maybe it's more versatile compared to the traditional blade systems.

From what I've seen, it's got pretty much what I think we need. Maybe after a little usage I can come up with new ideas, but right now it seems okay.

The possibility of using storage directly in the frame in order to have bigger storage directly there, and not having an attached storage like SAN or NAS. That would be helpful.

It will probably be with us for a lot of years to come. We are still in the process of buying the first one, so maybe we're not going to use the full ring architecture from the beginning, but in the future, since we're going to have just Synergy and not the old blade systems, it's definitely a possibility.

I don't know about the tech support. We have a consultant. There is a specific person that follows us and tries to help us in our needs.

This is the first time that we are using Synergy, so we don't yet have the experience to talk about this.

It provides the new computer node and connects 3PAR without SAN people to help me.

I think that they can improve the update because the update is problematic now. When you want to update the firmware, or when you want to update software on Composer, it takes a lot of time. A lot. For compute node, you need one hour for upgrading firmware. I think that is a big problem.

It became stable the second time. The first time, it wasn't. We had some problems but they're solved, and now it's stable.

We want to scale in three frames this year, we suppose, because they want to change everything in the datacenter. They want to put everything on Synergy. Synergy with integration with monitoring software, and Docker. So, we wanted to do this.

They are responsive. We don't have any problem at all when talking with them.

Overall we've had a good experience. We have had a little problem during startup because the OneView software is older than the last release. During the update, we had some problems, but HPE solved them quickly and perfectly.

The use case is to replace all stakes in all the different kinds of servers. We had some Dells, we had some old HPEs, Generation 6, Generation 7, and so on. We decided to put everything together and create a new datacenter, and move our computing power to a platform that will enable us to be more flexible with our old applications.

We are just in the middle of the migration, and the problem is not the new stuff, the problem is to persuade our old stuff that it must perform more than one gigabyte per second. So HPE is helping us to replicate directly through the old datacenter to storage that we have underneath our Synergy Servers. 

The benefit is that it's going to be maintained, contrary to what we had last year, when the maintenance went off for the last generation of the servers that we had there. 

I'm also looking forward to getting some adaptability, and to be more flexible.

As far as I can see, it's stable but, as I said, we have only been using it for six months.

We're in partial production. It's no longer a PoC. So far, we haven't hit any limits. 

The limits are much above what we have used till now.

We use tech support all the time. They were very active before signing the contract, and before delivering the contract. After delivering the contract, they became a little less active. So, it needs some pushing from my side sometimes. But, when the technicians come over, they connect with us. They are very, very supportive.

I imagine it's an issue of numbers. There's no new business behind it now, so that might be a problem with the numbers. When you are trying to sell something, you're very, very active. When you are discussing with an existing customer, then you don't have the pressure from the business side.

We had to switch to some solution. It didn't matter which one, we had to replace our old hardware anyway. It was last year when the Synergy came onto the market, and we asked HPE if they would take the opportunity to answer our RFP with the Synergy, and they won.

I wasn't involved in it, but my guys were. They were trained, and I think that they said it was much easier than what they used to previously. So, they're fine with it.

We did evaluate other vendors but they fell short in value for money. There were vendors that were cheaper, but their solutions weren't that cohesive. And the match-point of all the RFPs was the complete software that is behind the hardware. That was something that really persuaded us to give them top technical points from all the RFPs.

In terms of our criteria when selecting a vendor they include:

• it must be someone known, someone with a presence in the market
• someone with a good network of partners that can really help you
• a company that is active such that they are not just walking away after you've bought their solution
• reliability.

There are three or four big winners, and we don't want to change because we have some relationships and some experience from the past. When we run into a problem, and someone helped us, that's something called business credit. Something which goes beyond the money.

So far it runs as expected, which is really a nice surprise for me. When you are expecting something to be very fluent, and then, after using it for a year or more, you are seeing the downsides, which are very well hidden from the sales jargon. But, so far, we haven't come up against anything we didn't like.

I think that the completeness of the offer is one thing which should be taken into account. Also, the longevity of the solution. You don't want to change the solution every two or three or five years. I think this solution is something that might last at least seven or eight years, which is fine for us.