HPE Synergy Reviews

For us, it is a server refresh. We moved away from c7000 Enclosures.

The Synergy environment provides us with one view. We're able to manage the entire stack, top to bottom, from that single view.

The solution helps to manage our IT landscape, especially in setting up servers quickly, and making sure that the server types are distributed in our various dealer centers. That way, it's not reinventing the wheel all the time. It also helps us reconfigure servers for specific tasks and allocate more servers during busy times.

We are able to implement new business requirements quickly. For example, we are able to make sure that we implement DR capabilities at the snap of a finger. That's something that otherwise would have taken a couple of weeks to set up. We have the requirements already documented so we just replicate to other DR centers.

As a result of the solution, our IT infrastructure is about 60 percent more efficient than it used to be. DR was a big issue for us. Also, server provisioning, especially with the approach of using server templates and profiles, speeds up the time to market for servers. That's something that otherwise would probably take a couple of days to get done. Now it's just a push of a button. We're talking about it taking seconds to a minute.

In addition, I would say Synergy has decreased our deployment time by about 80 percent and it has reduced our cost of operations

Composability.

Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly.

There is room for improvement to OneView.

We are still in implementation.

The solution is highly scalable.

On a scale of one to five, five being excellent, technical support is a four.

It was just time for a hardware refresh. We had run to the end of our hardware refresh cycle. We are an HPE shop, so we came from a c7000 to Synergy.

The initial setup was complex. It's due to understanding the environment. My team had zero knowledge about the environment so we significantly leveraged resources from the reseller. Most importantly, we depended on them to bring all the technical expertise. We then got onboard to do what we could manage.

We used a reseller. On a scale of one to five, five being excellent, our experience with the reseller was a four.

We are not there yet. We are still in implementation. There are savings but we haven't measured them yet. We know we will see ROI. In terms of TCO, it's still too early to know because we're building all the processes and everything needed to manage the environment.

We looked at Cisco UCS.

Give it a chance. Go in head-first and, as you go through the process, you'll see that the benefits start showing themselves. But you have to make sure you have good governing processes implemented before you get in there.

The lessons we have learned from using this solution include the need to have an initial idea or knowledge of how the platform should work. We learned what kind of processes we needed to put in place to manage the environment before actually deploying. We depended on the reseller to do that. Those are some of the challenges that we have gone through.

We haven't gotten too much into the hybrid cloud environment. Everything is still on-prem. However, we run discreet workloads. I think the hybrid cloud environment is the next evolution for us. Similarly, HPE’s Pointnext services will be in our next phase of implementation.

I rate it at a nine out of ten. It completely changes the way we do business and there are a lot of opportunities. It especially decreases the time to market significantly.

I typically recommend HPE Synergy to companies in the banking sector, government, and telecom operators because of its centralized management and ease of administration.

The centralized management of HPE Synergy is beneficial because it is easy to manage and administer. Additionally, it offers significant compute power in approximately ten rack units, making it practical for workload optimization.

HPE Synergy could improve by developing the chassis to allow for more drives or disks. Currently, it supports only two drives in the blade server, which can be limiting.

I have been familiar with HPE Synergy for around five years.

Pricing in the blade server market is very competitive, with HPE offering a competitive price. Competitor products include Dell's MX series and Cisco's UCS X series.

I am also familiar with and resell Dell’s MX series and Cisco's UCS X series, which are competitive alternatives to HPE Synergy.

In addition to developing the chassis for more drives, HPE Synergy could also enhance the overall portfolio by adding a strong backup solution. I would rate HPE Synergy nine out of ten.

We use it for our infrastructure. We have multiple servers, therefore we use it as our main infrastructure for applications to host our servers.

We don't have a hybrid cloud environment. We use on-premise.

It has made our IT infrastructure teams more efficient. Previously, we had a standard infrastructure, which was compute, power, and storage. They had to run from one place to another to create a virtual machine. Now they can do everything in one shot.

In our old infrastructure, we had very high I/Os. Now, with Synergy, this has been reduced.

The newer technology is driving business and easing the administration process.

Synergy is a composable infrastructure. To have the ability to create:

• Workloads
• Power
• Compute
• Storage.

This is what drew us to Synergy.

With OneView, we can take care of all our servers in one dashboard.

It is very stable. We never had any issues with it.

It is highly scalable.

I have not used the technical support because I haven't had any issues.

Our infrastructure was very old. We had a lot of high I/Os. It was taking us a long time to create servers, etc. We knew that we had to change.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took us around six hours to set it up. There were no complications at all, because Synergy comes as a box. You don't have to do anything. You just have plug it into the network, and that is it. It's done.

We used a reseller, KDCC, for the deployment. They was great.

We used HPE’s Pointnext services to help move to this solution. They were great. The Professional Services of HPE were great. They came and set it up, making it an easy process.

We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 70 percent.

It costs us around $60,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent.

We looked at Dell EMC, VCE, and HPE. We went with the newest technology, which was composable infrastructure. The others were just hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would recommend the product. My team is very happy with the way the product is right now. It is an excellent product. We hadn't any issues with it.

Customer workloads of extensive computing

It reduced cabling overhead and increased the performance by reduced rack space.

The most valuable features are the converged network adapters.

This solution could be improved by increasing the speed on the conversion adapters. It should be 100 gigs. I would like to have bandwidth conversion on SBAs and ethernets to understand how much each physical server is consuming.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. There are a lot of server updates which require down time on each machine and each blade. The release cycle should be more frequent and offer additional features. 

We have experienced bottlenecks and set backs related to the speed of conversion adapters. There may be some limitations on scalability related to these adapters. 

The customer service for this solution is very good. We have a very good account manager and have not had any problems.

Positive

I also use Dell. I have found Dell's performance is better following the latest configurations. However, if we experience problems, HP support makes us feel more comfortable while Dell do not offer the same level of support. 

The initial setup is very simple. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Our standalone servers and Windows hypervisors are running on the product.

It is a good product for hypervisors. The performance is fine.

The firmware, software, and driver levels must be improved. The product should be stabilized as soon as possible. Some hardware of the product was not in good condition. We faced some issues within six months. We requested HPE to replace them. The solution must concentrate on improving the product quality.

I have been using the solution for more than two to three years.

The tool is stable. I rate the product’s stability a seven or eight out of ten. We faced a few hardware failures.

The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. There were some limitations on some hardware. Around 8000 people use the product in my organization.

The solution provides good support. The support team will be available on-site for any new installation or configuration needs. In middle-east, HPE’s support team is far better than any other company. Support is important.

We were using a different solution before. We switched to HPE because of the support provided by them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment took one or two hours. A consultant from HPE helped us deploy the product. We needed one or two people to deploy the tool.

The license comes with the solution.

The solution is periodically making improvements. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of HPE Synergy is for invoicing. Our Brazil office uses the solution as we do not have Oracle ERP there. It is a legacy system.

HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years. Our offices in Brazil do not want to change.

There really isn't any valuable feature. Our team in Brazil does not want to change, and that is why it's still running there. They have not improved their product since it was purchased. I would like to see the product be compatible with Oracle invoicing or Salesforce invoicing.

HPE Synergy should be easier to use and integrate with other databases like Tableau and with the cloud. It is difficult to integrate with cloud-based data sets. I also would like to see better customization ability.

I have been using HPE Synergy for 15 years.

The solution is stable. It has been running for 15 years.

HPE Synergy is not scalable. If you have a bigger workload or have more invoices, it is not scalable. You need to stay within a certain capacity. We have over 150 users from payroll and accounting using this product.

HPE Synergy supports the product, but not in terms of enhancing the product. I would rate customer service and support a four out of five.

Neutral

I worked with Oracle and Salesforce. Both of those solutions are easy to customize to the needs of each of our organization's structures. They each have some unique needs. Oracle and Salesforce are ready to provide those types of customizations quickly. HPE Synergy does not accommodate these types of customizations.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The primary use case would be our virtualization platforms, ranging from our presentation layers to just commodity workloads. 

I don't know that we're too much focused on hybrid cloud just yet, since we're a service provider. A lot of our clients are paying us to host their workloads. It's not like we're running our own IT and putting it in the cloud, as well. However, as we do move things there, these workloads are probably the ones that are most opportune to move to the public cloud. So, it would generate a hybrid scenario, as these are Citrix presentation systems, and also Windows and Linux VMs, which can move back and forth.

It has improved our procurement and day zero provisioning. We are bringing in racks of Synergy which are not populated with the blades, then we are buying the blades and populating them, as our business needs. This has been pretty helpful to be able to sort of pre-package the data center with the Synergy platform, then deploy servers into it as we grow.

The solution has driven us to use the OneView platform and have more alignment with HPE's strategic directions. We are still learning what that means to us, but at least it has put us in better alignment with where HPE is at. When we do find something that doesn't work, they are incentivized to fix it better than if we weren't aligned with their vision.

Synergy has actually challenged us to rethink how our IT infrastructure teams are structured. So, we're still dealing with that. Our hope is that by having OneView, Synergy, and software-defined that we will realize the value statement over time.

So far, the solution has helped us implement our new business requirements quickly. Synergy has the ability to have everything pre-packaged and being able to slide blades in. That is what we have always liked about blade architectures: We can slide a blade in, or if we need to move it, we can go move it somewhere else. There is less cabling to deal with, etc. It is one of the attractive things of the platform that we first got excited about it.

We bought in pretty early to the composability story and being able to software-define the compute. We are realizing a fair amount of that. 

It has been in the external integrations to other platforms that we have, which aren't HPE, where some of our challenges have been. We are still working on these.

I would like to see some integrations with non-HPE platforms. The Synergy platform is working pretty well in most cases. It does what it is advertised to do. Integrating it into our larger environment that is not HPE products has been somewhat of our challenge. I would challenge HPE to go fix and address these gaps. Have a story there, because not everybody will run HPE throughout their entire data center. I have other suppliers in there, and they have to work together.

What we are observing is to upgrade a whole rack of Synergy, so four frames when it's fully loaded, we are spending about 50 human hours doing that. There is a lot of work time and wait time in there. Overall, this work effort is spread across a bunch of people and the total time is about 50 hours. I don't know what percent increase that necessarily is, but it is a lot of work that we didn't do before. So, it feels like a big increase. That is still us rationalizing how the platform should be maintained.

I would like something that makes it even easier for developers to leverage OneView. It is all API driven. However, if you are using the web GUI that is OneView, you can't get any feedback about, "If I click this button, that button, or that button, before I hit go..." Show me what the API call is. Help me develop code faster if I am not a developer who wants to go read the whole API guide. Help me point, click, and start to develop code incrementally.

Stability-wise, it has been pretty good. When we are doing maintenance events. we have had some hiccups. We have definitely lost redundancy. There was one incident where we had everything go down. For the most part, what we are observing is the redundancy in the platform is working reasonably well. With the upgrades, we are just losing redundancy. 

We're not expecting it to go down. Our expectation is we will run our workload 100 percent of time, even while we're upgrading the platform. In some instances, that's happened, and in the ones that it hasn't, it is definitely a bug that the HPE team is trying to address.

We haven't hit the scale edge of it yet. However, we like what the solution says it will do. There have been some instances where we have overrun some of the software scaling, even without being at a massive hardware scale yet in the network space inside of Synergy. They are working on this, and it is something that we hope will continue.

We often find ourselves having to get into the Tier 2 and 3 support or into the development teams. Based on our scale, and what we do with this platform and others, we tend to find more bugs that are edge cases for most other people. Therefore, Tier 1 support is of little interest to us. However, when we have gotten to the right people, the technical support has been really good.

They stopped selling the old solution. We were using the c7000 blade infrastructure from HPE.

There were other things that we could have tried to do to wire up our environment differently. Having more simplistic cabling, being able to pre-stage frames, and slide servers is the experience that we desire to have. However, if it doesn't work with the other suppliers in my data center, then the experience quickly stops mattering.

Our environment is very complex. That had a fair amount of bearing on deploying this platform. The OneView tool promises to make things simpler. Sometimes, it overlooks some of the really edge cases of the configuration to make things simpler, and that's what we found. There would be another tool to go to behind the scenes to go do what we need to do or troubleshoot. So, we have challenged the HPE team: "OneView should be the one thing to go to. There should not be something else behind it, telling me to go login here, but rejecting me because I don't have that username and password, then making me call support to login." We don't like that.

We worked directly with HPE. Our experience with them was good. They came to the table and really worked with us. We generated a lot of bug tickets and issues, so we had a lot of really challenging conversations. However, the fact that they were there to have those conversations is why we wanted them.

HPE has brought people to bear for the project that would likely have come out of a Pointnext engagement in other cases. However, we haven't directly done something with Pointnext services.

We have definitely seen performance increases in the platform. A lot of that was related to just the componentry that is in it. We have sort of bought into the vision of where the platform is going to go and are hoping to see additional performance gains there. 

Synergy feels a little heavy still on the day to upgrade operations, etc. However, we have gained some efficiencies on the provisioning front-end side.

The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware.

it was pretty much the top three: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco, when we started looking at new compute. 

We decided to maintain our partnership with HPE because it's been around a long time. We know each other really well. We do a lot of business which is not server-related. They came to the table with their pricing models, investment strategies, and the partnership that they wanted to do to make their products fit better for us, which is why we chose to stick with them.

If you are deploying solutions that are well aligned with what HPE has designed this platform to do, then you will probably have pretty good success. If you are sort of weird, like us, and the things you do come off as strange, or whatever, there will be some things you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for. Therefore, you should really be partnering with HPE. You should be asking to talk to their development teams and getting feedback, such as, "Here's what we're seeing and here's how we're using it." Sometimes, as we've heard from the development teams, we've used features that they've created in ways they didn't imagine. We had some results that we didn't expect nor did they. So, that's what we're working on. If you think you will be in a similar situation, open that communication channel early and express that need to your account team.

Deployment time has decreased, for sure. What we have detected is we think the care and feeding maintenance over time might be a little higher than what we had expected. However, that is part of: 

• How are we going to structure the team? 
• How are we going to plan the work?
• How will the solution set get better?

I don't think our development team really knows of the solution or has any interactivity with it. Therefore, it hasn't necessarily enhanced nor has it detracted from a developer standpoint either.

In our environment, with what we are trying to achieve, it still has a ways to go.

The biggest lesson learned is that if you really buy into software-defined and start moving to infrastructure as code, there is a lot of power potential there, if you can just stay the course.

We use the solution for infrastructure and business applications. We have the mini virtualization and physical servers. We need to consolidate all the servers in one management.

The most valuable of Synergy is the architecture and hardware-software combination. There is a layer between the OS andI have used HPE C7000, Cisco UCS, and Dell PowerEdge M. the hardware. It easily manages the servers.

Using HPE Transporters instead of train switches would simplify network configuration by creating a flat network without zoning between servers and storage, fostering tighter integration.

The product is stable and redundant.

The solution is scalable with the same switches up to five frames.

I'm using tech support for compatibility and some complex configurations.

I have used HPE C7000, Cisco UCS, and Dell PowerEdge M.

The initial setup is easy.

Synergy delivers a strong ROI for more complex solutions like VMware Cloud Foundation deployments or when using six or more nodes.

You have to propose Synergy with your customer base.

It is easy to maintain the solution because InfoSight is applied to Synergy.

HPE Synergy solutions are a unified platform. However, some organizations might prefer solutions from other vendors like IBM or Cisco, depending on their specific budget and design requirements.

HPE Synergy has excellent support with mini service centers, contributing to a positive customer experience.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.