HPE Synergy Reviews

Our primary use case is primary compute. 

Everything is in one place. We have one place to with OneView. It provides one console with one place to get to everything. The one interface makes it easier. We have one guy who does almost everything in it.

The solution has decreased the deployment time for a new blade, saving us three hours. However, it has not decreased the deployment time for a VM.

It is very flexible.

The biggest problem that I have with it is the speed of setup.

It is very stable after the initial setup. We have flaky things, like a lot of bad fans.

We bought it half loaded with 18 blades, so we can still add 18 blades. That in itself makes it pretty scalable.

HPE doesn't have the expertise internally to set these things up.

Our previous solution was old. We were using HPE blade chassis.

We switched a year and a half ago, then again eight months ago.

The initial setup was complex. It was slow and just didn't work. Even HPE couldn't make it work for 45 days.

We use HPE Pointnext services to come out and change our bad drives.

As we move more workloads to the Synergy, then we will see more of a return on investment.

It has reduced our cost of operations by a headcount of 33 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 5 percent due to headcount.

Since Synergies are expensive, our TCO may have gone up.

We always looked at HPE. It was really a choice between a blade chassis or Synergy.

Except for the setup, everything else is fantastic. It is a really good product, but make sure you have a lot of time to set it up.

We run VMware on it, and always have. So, it is either run it on the stack or run it on Synergy, which is the same thing for us.

VMware helps us implement our business requirements more so than Synergy.

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.

We're using Synergy primarily as a replacement for our C7000 Blade servers, which are going out-of-life.

We use VMware ESX across all of our Synergy nodes. On top of that, we have a mixture of workloads from web servers, application servers, and Microsoft SQL databases.

Using this solution has allowed me to devote more time to other tasks since the administration is so easy.

Our business needs are somewhat static, so we do not often have to implement new business requirements. However, when we have had to spin things up quickly, we were able to do that in this environment.

This solution has greatly increased the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams. We have fewer administrators working on the infrastructure, and we’ve now been able to transition a number of those people into DevOps roles.

This solution has decreased our deployment time, although I cannot give exact figures. I can say that we’ve been able to implement the Blue-Green Methodology as a result of the increased capacity that we have in the Synergy environment.

Using Synergy has reduced our cost of operations because it allows more dense placement of the virtual machines than our previous solution.

The most valuable features of this solution are the ease of management and the integration with OneView. The ease that we can allocate servers during busy times helps us to manage our IT landscape.

A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution.

I would like to see an increased variety of uplink options in the Virtual Connects.

The inclusion of these features would allow us to more easily grow our network infrastructure and accommodate future growth.

There are improvements that can be made in the area of OneView integrations and firmware, with respect to how the proper firmware versions are matched to the OneView installation that you have. 

This solution has been quite stable for us, so far. There have been a number of updates and the product is still going through a maturity cycle, so I expect that the stability will continue.

For the most part, our developers are not aware of the underlying infrastructure on which they're doing the work, but that’s probably a good thing because if they were aware then it may be for bad reasons. We’ve had a lot of success with continuous uptime on these boxes, so it’s not really noticed by our developers.

One of the reasons that we purchased Synergy is that it's easily scalable.

Technical support has been a bit of a mixed bag. When we've had issues, we've called in and sometimes it's taken a while to get to a resolution. Generally, I would say that I'm satisfied with technical support.

We have used the HPE PointNext services, and they are very knowledgeable engineers.

We were using C7000 Enclosures and some Rack Mount servers. Our existing C7000 Blade Chassis Enclosure was performing well, but it is going end-of-support so we needed something new. We did an evaluation of Synergy and we found that it fit our needs.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We used a value-added reseller and hired the HPE installation services to come with the solution. They assisted us with setting it up, and the experience was quite good.

We have seen ROI, although I do not have datapoints that I can share.

We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on. This is in addition to the VMware and Microsoft licensing for the operating systems.

Our IT infrastructure costs have not been affected by this solution. Most of our infrastructure surrounding and supporting Synergy was already purchased prior to it being set up.

We did not look outside of HPE, as we're exclusively an HPE shop on the compute side. We looked at the available offerings and wanted to make sure that they fit our needs through a proof of concept.

Synergy is definitely a solution that I would recommend for forward-thinking IT shops.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is to make sure that you do all of the available training sessions on the new technology.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for processing our analytics platform. The solution enables us to do all of our analytic workflows in a hybrid cloud environment.

The processing time has been about 50 times faster and allows us to do AI models.

The solution has helped us implement new business requirements quickly with new audience requests because Synergy's compute power when combined with 3PAR has been really terrific.

We have had very low infrastructure requirements because of its simple setup. It has helped us dramatically improve our SLAs.

The manageability is its most valuable feature. It is a fully managed platform, which is very simple to manage. It lets us set up servers quickly.

It allows us to have better throughput.

I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure.

Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent.

So far, it has been very stable. We've only had to reboot it once.

We like the scalability. being able to drop new nodes into the rack.

The technical support has been very good. 

Our old solution was too slow, and we were at risk of losing client jobs.

I would have purchased the product sooner, but it didn't exist.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there.

We used an HPE partner for the deployment. They were terrific.

We have absolutely seen ROI: The number of jobs processed and being able to process jobs within the allotted time frame, so we have not lost any jobs. Thus, the solution has certainly paid for itself.

The solution decreased our deployment time. It only took 10 percent of the time.

We outright purchased Synergy. 

Our TCO has been affected by five percent.

HPE and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We chose HPE Synergy because it was the superior solution.

It handles everything that we are looking to do.

Consider using it in conjunction with Nimble.

Biggest lesson learned: Be more on top of what HPE products and solutions are available.

VMware is our primary use case for this solution. We run all of our production servers and non-production servers. That's what our cloud delivers virtual workloads to.

Today we're using a stateless Auto Deploy, which guarantees consistency across all of our ESX hosts, but that is only possible if we're using template-driven and standardized processes on the hardware. We can guarantee all of our network and our storage, the firmware baselines - everything is exactly the same for every system that sits within a cluster.

It has improved management of our IT landscape because we spend a lot less time dealing with inconsistencies and things like firmware and driver management.

Synergy also helps us implement new business requirements quickly. We can deploy new ESX servers faster than we could on the previous c-series blade systems.

It has positively affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team quite a bit in the last year. We spend less than a day deploying new hosts, where it would take us a week previously. So our deployment time is about one-fifth of what it was. We're able to deliver expanding capacity at a much faster rate. We're also looking to continue that into automation using OneView so that we can automate that process, rather than having an IT team handling all those steps manually.

It would typically take us about a week to deploy a new host and now we're at less than a day. So in terms of our cost of operations, given the reduction of our deployment times, down to 20 percent of the time it used to take, we're definitely saving time. That's time our engineers can spend doing other things, working on other projects and priorities.

Everything is template driven so it helps us standardize all the settings across all the many servers. On the previous HPE platform, we struggled because everything was independent. We had to manage firmware on each server, storage and network configuration on each server. Synergy is template-driven so we can ensure consistency of all of those settings. It allows us to standardize configuration and ensure consistency across the board.

A big thing for me is moving InfoSight for ProLiant into OneView, or at least connecting it. Today we have to use the iLO Amplifier Pack and that would require us to reconfigure iLO on every single one of the servers, independently, to get that data into InfoSight. We're really looking for a single control and management plane.

Also, Fibre Channel support within the Virtual Connect modules is lagging behind on the speed and the connections and configuration.

We've had quite a few issues with stability on this system, with the Gen10 blades - with memory specifically. It's been problematic.

The scalability is good for our size of company. The way we're deploying ESX and the automation that we're doing through OneView, it doesn't matter whether we're trying to add one host or ten new hosts, it takes roughly the same amount of time. So it allows us to scale much quicker than we did previously.

On a scale of one to ten, technical support is a five. We get decent support, but it could definitely be improved.

When they told us that the c7000 was being retired, we decided we didn't want to invest in a technology that had an end date. We started looking at Synergy as a replacement and started migrating to that.

The setup was pretty easy, but we did have familiarity with OneView prior to deploying it. That probably helped.

We did not use a third-party.

I'm not involved with the financials, but from a labor perspective we have definitely seen ROI by reducing the time it takes for us to deploy. We're reducing the man-hours we're spending on deploying new systems as well as on maintaining the existing ones.

We have a dual-vendor strategy, so HPE isn't the only vendor that we have. We're running Cisco and HPE, the two major vendors, and I don't think that any of the alternatives outside of those two have anything that can match the scale and ease of use of those two platforms.

Look past the upfront, initial acquisition costs. A lot of your return on the investment is going to be in labor saved, as well as driving consistency and conformity in the environment.

I rate Synergy at eight out of ten. Overall, we're pretty happy. There are minor things, like the InfoSight integration into OneView and some stability issues which are more attributed to Intel CPUs than the platform. We've been pretty happy with it. Since getting it set up, it's been very easy to manage and maintain.

We use it for ESXi installations. It is for private clouds with application servers.

It helps us manage our IT landscape because it is easy, standard, and very consolidated. You don't need to have the storage and communications apart, because it's all consolidated.

The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity.

The solution has affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams by being easy to install.

It is very standard and easy to install.

I am rating this solution an eight (out of ten) because it is really good. However, you can always improve some things.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

The scalability is very good.

We haven't used the technical support, as we haven't had any problems.

We were using the c7000 blade system. We switched because we wanted to test something new. Also, it was announced that there would be other sales.

We have a capacity plan that we do every year. When we estimated what we needed for the current year, we decided that we wanted to invest in Synergy.

The initial setup was very easy.

We used an integrator for the deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

It has kept our cost of operations stable.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to.

We evaluated HPE and Dell EMC.

It is a good solution. We are happy with it. You should try it out.

The development team is very happy with the performance.

Biggest lesson learnt: Try new things, even if it wasn't your first choice. Always look for new things, and if they're good, then you should change.

Our primary use case is data center and tech refresh/cloud.

This product is basically a step in our transformation to be more hybrid.

We are still in the transformational phase, but the benefit will definitely be the infrastructure of code components.

It does help us to manage our IT landscape with the ease of deployment through OneView.

The solution affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team with the infrastructure as code and the ease and agility to deploy.

The most valuable feature is its compatibility.

The solution has decreased our deployment time.

Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more. However, it is still a great deployment methodology overall.

In my experience, HPE has always been highly available and highly reliable. I would expect Synergy to be nothing less.

The scalability is very good. The ability to link chassis or frames together makes it simplistic, especially with the use of OneView.

I haven't had to work with technical support yet, so the product was built well.

We were using traditional HPE c7000 chassis. We needed something a bit more modernized to enable the company's transformation.

The initial setup is straightforward. The infrastructures as code enables you to fill out the configuration before you even deploy it, then it is just a one-touch deployment.

I just switched companies. My old company did not use Pointnext services. This new company does use Pointnext services, and it's a lot easier to get the hardware on demand. You don't have to worry about making those hard upfront capitol purchases.

We used ConRes for the deployment, and my experience with them has always been great.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations by at least 15 to 20 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by at least 30 percent, mainly because of the density compared to our former infrastructure.

We were looking at Nutanix, as well as the HPE Synergy. The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy. Overall, we are pleased with Synergy.

Take a serious look at Synergy.

The development team hasn't been brought into it.

We use this solution to run both our production and non-production environments. We currently do not have any cloud initiatives, but we bought it so that we can be future protected for the cloud.

Where it used to take one week to re-image or upgrade our hosts, it can now take one day.

This solution helps us with new business requirements because we have the ability to expand or add more frames, depending on the requests from the business process.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of deploying servers, profiles, and images.

Having that single pane of glass is a good feature for the management of our environment.

The vendor needs to focus on the features that are already included and make them better.

The installation and initial setup process is complex and needs to be improved.

Once this solution is implemented, it is very stable.

One of the reasons we chose this solution is because it's highly scalable.

I don't think that the technical support for the product is there yet. I think that they're building up people to that novel technology, but there's very limited knowledge at the first and second level of support for this product.

The initial setup of this solution is complex. The interconnects would not connect and nobody knew why. It took at least forty days to complete.

We used an integrator for our deployment. We felt that they lacked in-depth knowledge of the product. They knew the service stuff, but if something went wrong then they didn't really know how to bring it back online.

I would say that we haven't seen ROI yet, but it was a way to get off of our old chassis and we had to start fresh. I would say that we will have our savings by year five.

This solution has decreased our deployment time by approximately sixty-five percent.

My advice is that if you're looking for a product that helps you save time when deploying your hosts, then this is the perfect solution. It is flexible and can handle many different workloads.

The biggest thing that I have learned from using this solution is to be patient. Once it's up and running it's great.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.