HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

• Composable infrastructure
• Ability to easily re-utilize parts of the hardware for different purposes
• Central management with HPE OneView
• Ability to see the health status of the entire infrastructure
• Ability to quickly and easily deploy changes and see that they are successful
• Simplify management of platforms

• Peace of mind.
• Knowing that our platforms are running well, simplifying day-to-day management, so that we can do more with less staff and increase performance.
• The increased scale of the back-end networking and the compute that we can deliver through it.
• A single, unified infrastructure that can be optimized and makes our life easier by allowing us to be more nimble in the way that we deploy our platforms. If people are looking for a particular type of hypervisor or a particular workload platform, we can very quickly and easily change the way that our platforms are configured to meet those requirements without delay or hassle.
• In terms of programmatic interface of the solution, I got to play around with it in one of the labs. It seems to be very feature rich and it is something that we'll certainly be looking into.
• This automation will make our IT more efficient. It will mean that we can be sure that configurations are deployed correctly. It will take out a lot of the risk of people typing in the wrong information, or setting things up incorrectly. From a quality control point of view, it certainly will help us.
• Software-defined infrastructure simplifies our operations, as it is nimble. We will be able to quickly and easily change how we use our infrastructure to meet our customers' changing demands.
• We value a modular infrastructure with shared power as our infrastructure is in data centers. Being able to just walk in there or see a piece of equipment and get it installed without having to go through the rigors of cabling and configuration makes it so much simpler as we grow. We're a growing business, and we are deploying new hardware regularly. Simplifying that whole process is good from a resource point of view. If it's simple, it means that we don't have to go through lengthy contracts to get engineers to do all the hard work.
• Automated life-cycle management of firmware drivers makes our IT operations simpler. It means that we can be sure that our firmware is up-to-date across our platform. It means we can very quickly and easily identify areas where we need to focus. It also means that we can report on a regular basis, rather than it being a special task that somebody does manually. Traditionally as the server pool grows, it becomes harder and harder to manage, but Synergy makes that easy.

We'd like to see faster networking in the back-end. I'm not saying it's slow at the moment, but we would just like more speed from a future-proofing point of view. We are seeing 25 Gig capability in our switch fabric so extending that to Synergy compute nodes makes sense. I guess it is a natural progression that is coming to the Synergy platform as well.

Our Synergy platform has been in place since April 2017.

The system operates well and allows changes to be made with confidence. We have been through a OneView version upgrade and the deployment of firmware into the Virtual Connect components and the Servers without any downtime. This is the way it should be!

Scalability is perfect. It has plenty of network capacity and plenty of space for adding more service as we grow.

We used HPE for the startup. During the initial deployment, we did have technical people on staff and we did a lot on our own. We were happy with the support that we received from HPE.

I was involved in the initial setup, from a guidance point of view. I worked with the HPE engineers who did the original deployment and then on a day-to-day basis, just setting up the final bits and pieces. We added things as we went along. It was lengthy and I think we had a reasonably unique deployment, which took a bit of “to and fro” to get the completed solution in place. There are enough differences between Synergy and the old c7000 platform that you do need to put effort into your design. HPE helped with that process and we have ended up with a well implemented solution because of that.

We have looked at other vendors from time to time, but we have been an HPE shop for the last six years.

The architecture was part of our decision to invest in a full venture.

We consider performance and reliability to be the two main factors in choosing a vendor. In Synergy, we saw both of those, performance and reliability, being delivered.

For us, it's all about up-time and a good performance experience for our customers and Synergy helps us do that.

We knew that we needed to invest in this solution, because it was just the next step. We started with DL servers and we moved to the c7000 Blade Infrastructure. Synergy just seems to be the next logical step up. We haven't seen anything else in the market that competes with this kind of product.

When looking for a vendor, we look for support. We want to know that we can call somebody and get support when we need it. We want to know that the parts are available if there is an issue. If there is a configuration problem, we know that HPE will fix it.

Make sure you get a good plan in place. Think about your networking and your storage, so you can get it all configured as one. Use HPE's technical resources to make sure that all of the components are certified to work together.

In the data center, you see customers with a lot of blade enclosures and a lot of servers, and this solution works fine.

I have one customer in Belgium that I know that is testing it, and they're quite happy about it. There are some challenges, but it is software. For software, you have developers.

The hardware is there.

With the changing IT demands, they need to change more often and faster. We need applications to model tomorrow’s needs. We need more applications for changing users. There is a need for a more optimized infrastructure.

For instance, I have a customer with 20 blade enclosures. In those 20 blade enclosures, there are 40 management modules that you need to update and manage.

In troubleshooting, you have to determine if the issue is in one, two, or in all 20 modules. The diagnosis is harder.

With Synergy, we only have two management modules instead of 40. It's an efficiency thing that needs to be improved.

We'll see what will come next. We will probably see other types of enclosures, smaller or larger ones, and more options on the storage and networking side. This is the typical evolution of IT to go to more and faster.

Synergy is new, but the advantage is that technically, it's a ProLiant server, so it is stable. Proven technology with a lot of new features.

HPE has proven track records worldwide delivering superb support on hard- and software. This is the same for Synergy.

One of my things I do in my company is write technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have.

I don't have a Synergy enclosure yet in my home lab, a.k.a., data center in my garage, but I'm quite sure that it is simple enough that my nine-year old daughter could install it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, "we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it.

I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

It increases the throughput. We had a problem with the C7000 with the down-link speed to the individual blades and what the up-link speeds were. Memory was kind of a constraint problem for us.

Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us.

One of the bigger changes is in that larger form size, we can get more things in the individual blades. We can also deal with higher thermals on the CPUs, which are all kind of significant.

We're still testing the storage device to see exactly if that's going to be useful for us or not.

The idea of taking 3PAR and directly attaching it could be compelling for us. We just have a few more things that we need to test out to see if they got fixed from the beta process.

It's mainly the fact that it gives us the next generation of the C7000, which we've been using since 2009. That gets us in that same useful pattern. The concept of virtual connect, OneView, is compelling. It extends our existing operational knowledge and gives us a longer run life with that kind of pattern. It still solves my issue with cabling and power in the data centers. It is using newer technologies which solve the issues we had with the C7000s.

One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput.

What they're coming out with initially on the road map is a 40 Gig up-link on virtual connect. That would be one of the things that we'd like. Other things that would be useful for us would be adding an AMD CPU to their product line in the 2018 time-frame.

We are currently testing stability. The beta system had some issues. They were supposed to fix them as they came up in production and we'll confirm that when we get to it.

In terms of scalability, we're happy with it in general. We look forward to what we can do with it. We believe that it should be able to replace what we've been doing with the C7000s. It mechanically would reduce the number of C7000s that we'd be running. Because we're growing, we still need to add enclosures.

We have used HPE technical support for this solution in the beta process. We were heavily tied into that. They were great. Some of the bugs that they fixed led us to another bug. But when talking to the product manager, everything that we identified as a bug has now been fixed in the GA product. We'll just confirm this later.

Before Synergy, we were using C7000s. We knew that the road map of that new technology coming in the C7000 was coming to an end.

If you're going to buy that new capacity and you're not going to fully populate the enclosures, then you need to move off C7000 and go to Synergy.

When selecting a vendor, I look for operational stability. One of the things that drove us to stay on HPE, as opposed to Cisco UCS, was the fact that UCS basically stops at the hyper-visor. HPE actually goes all the way up to the OS and beyond. If you have an issue with SQL, you can get help from HPE. You can't really get help from Cisco.

The initial setup, because it was still in beta, was complex. We discovered several bugs in the networking and bugs in the way some of the iLO functions worked. We were one of the more prolific groups in the beta program. Those issues should be fixed and we'll confirm that later.

Think about where you want to be in five years and choose the products in the Synergy family that will help you get to that point. You have a lot of options and if you just buy what is cost effective today, you may find yourself in trouble five years from now.