HPE Synergy Reviews

• Graphical workstations
• Replacing the c7000 systems
• Analytics
• DevOps, using containers.

We bought it with the intent to replace the c7000 workstation blades. It is bigger than the workstation blades in core count, memory, and graphical capabilities. So, it has broadened us in that regard, and we have more capabilities.

It is very easy to reproduce. We have a bare metal kickstart and deployment process, which are very quick and easy. We haven't yet taken advantage of the Image Streamer capabilities of the product just yet.

• Flexibility
• iLO
• The interface to the back-end
• CPUs
• Memory
• Graphics capabilities

It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure.

We are all about graphics. I know that the Synergy has a sidecar on it, so innovation into graphics capabilities and more broadly used storage. Right now, we have 180 blades and 15 frames, but our only solution for storage is either onboard the blade itself or some network-based storage. We could probably bring some Fibre Channel into play. However, we would maybe like to see some innovation around the storage and those systems.

It still has some room to grow. For our solution, we need something between the c7000 and Synergy. Synergy is the high-end deployment, and we're still learning to how to do the composable infrastructure, so we can turn it around and make it look like this today and that tomorrow. The c7000 gave us a stable workstation remodel. We went from an Acura to a Maserati, needing something in between.

It is not very stable because of the image streaming and the issues that we had with it, which were more software-based. The hardware is very stable. The software which runs the hardware part is where we had our biggest problems with it.

It scales really well. We have 15 frames of Synergy with five racks. It has three frames per rack, so it scales really well.

On a scale of one to 10, the technical support is probably a six. It got better as we got deeper into the Tiered support. The initial support with its Tier 1 and 2 support weren't very useful or helpful at all. It was only when we engaged our Salesforce to help us get into the backdoor to talk to their Tier 3 team did we start to see things circulate.

It was communicated through to the sales team who supports us. We were looking for a replacement solution for the HPE c7000 workstation class blades, and this is what was recommended as a solution.

The initial setup was very complex. The cabling was such that it had to be done a certain way. It is one of those things that you want to not touch once it's stood up. That is our initial impression.

We did use Professional Services to help us deploy the Image Streamer and database back-end. They set it up and left. We had to reconfigure it and move it from rack to rack. That is when it broke, then we had to reengage those people again.

We have seen ROI. We have the ability to quickly compute. Instead of in the traditional way, one of the nice things that Synergy brings is that it is a big enough platform. We are putting a hypervisor on the system and carving off a portion of that to attach it to the graphics card,  then the remainder of the CPU and memory are available for virtual compute.

The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually.

When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it.

It reduced our IT infrastructure cost by a little because of the amount of capacity and it is bigger. I only have 12 blades in Synergy, where in the c7000, I had 16 blades. I lost four systems for customers in the way that we deploy systems.

We like HPE because of the technology they bring to bear. Other competitors have blade systems, but they don't have graphics enablement. HPE also has a product called RGS, which we use very heavily. That partnership alone is huge. Thus, we have a huge investment in HPE.

Ask more questions to challenge the answers that the sales community gives. We went into the product thinking that we knew the product previously. That it just needed to be a maturation of the product, and it wasn't. I would poke more technical questions at them. Sometimes, with the bleeding edge, you have to be careful. We were one of the first adopters of it, and some of the bugs were still in it when we were ready for production work, so maybe it wasn't production ready.

It is a good, stable product. It will become more mature. Ask the questions of your sales team and the technical solution architect, ensuring that it's for you. Consider the total cost of ownership, and maybe starting out simpler.

It is touted to be composable. However, we haven't used it as composable. It is more of a replacement for an existing service right now.

The deployment time stayed about the same, because we deployed the same way.

It has added value to the process. It impacted us initially when we were deploying it. We were trying to troubleshoot the problem when we should have been under production, and we were about eight months behind deployment because of it. So, it impacted us in a negative way. With total cost of ownership, once we determine how to start using the composable infrastructure, it should add to that.

The primary use case is VMware hosts. Since most of our environment is virtualized, it is our primary compute.

We have nine c7000 enclosures, and even with Virtual Enterprise Connect Manager, I would sometimes have to go on each enclosure to make changes. I have not run into a situation yet where I cannot manage all of the Synergy enclosures from OneView.

We have seen an improvement in the efficiency of our IT infrastructure. It is faster to do firmware upgrades through the deployment of new bladed servers.

I like the OneView management. It is much better than the old management for the c7000 enclosures, which is what Synergy replaces. It is a big step up, and it is much easier to use and quicker.

Synergy is much easier to use, which is saving us time. We are able to set the profiles for firmware upgrades. This makes the process for the care and feeding of the IT environment much simpler, quicker, and cleaner.

The setup experience needed some improvement.

So far, it has been very stable. However, it is a small sample size.

It seems to scale nice. We're going to eventually replace all of our c7000 enclosures, but we're not going to end up having nine Synergy enclosures because we're going to gain so much better density. That is a big selling point. With the Gen 10 Blades, we can easily do a 3:1 consolidation, which will help us out a lot down the road.

The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up. We had some requirements from our information security department, and technical support wasn't able to give me immediate answers. They had to engage engineering, which they did, then they got me the answers. However, it took a week of back and forth conversations and phone calls to get it all worked out. It got done, which was good.

I don't remember if our c7000 enclosures are end-of-sale yet, but it is pretty close. So, they got to go.

The complexity of the setup was medium, but it was good. We didn't have to map things out. It was still faster than setting up what would have been with the c7000s, but it wasn't just a drop in, turn it on, and it worked. We had to configure the composer, figure out all our networks, and things like that. We had to do some network configuration, but there were white papers for all that. So, the setup was medium, and we were able to get through it pretty much ourselves with the help of AdvizeX.

We did a remote install, then we engaged a third-party partner of HPE (AdvizeX) to help us with the configuration. They were very good.

It makes our deployment time go faster, decreasing the process time by half. The big time savings are on the upgrade process. That is much faster. For example, last time that we upgraded the c7000 enclosure's firmware levels for the OAs and interconnects, it was effectively 40 man-hours worth of effort. With Synergy in OneView, it was easily a quarter of that. It was such a better experience.

We stood up 11 Gen 10 Synergy blades, which ended up replacing approximately 25 Gen 7 c7000 blades. So, you're looking at a 2:1 consolidation in hardware. We're expecting that as the Gen 8s age out, we're going to do the exact same thing, and we will be more aggressive there, where we are looking at a 3:1 consolidation. Managing fewer servers will save a lot of time and effort, along with having everything in OneView.

We have looked at Dell EMC MX7000 offering. In the interest of time and familiarity, we stuck with HPE. Bring in an entire new set of hardware infrastructure was not a good idea. There would be too many moving pieces, and we wanted to stick with something we knew. We have Gen9s in the c7000s, and we will eventually put them all into OneView. If we bring in Dell EMC, we now have two management platforms operating side-by-side, which is not a good idea.

I prefer OneView a lot to the Enterprise Manager on the c7000s. It is so much cleaner and a lot better.

Keep in mind, because you can get a lot denser workloads, you're not going to just go, "Oh, I've X number of c7000 enclosures, or even DLs, so I'm going to get the same amount." You're going to get consolidation. You're going to get more one pane of management than what you did before. Therefore, figure out how to take advantage of that.

We use it primarily for hypervisors at the moment. We're looking at expanding into VDI, but it's primarily for hypervisors.

It gives us a lot more flexibility for spinning up new hypervisors, compared to the c7000. We use the VMM tie-in. There's a VMM OneView plugin that works really well. We do one-touch deployment for our new hypervisors.

It helps us implement new business requirements quickly. If we needed to, we could spin up a number of hypervisors pretty easily.

In terms of the efficiency of our IT infrastructure, the capacity is pretty nice. The density that we get out of it is really nice. It's a regular chassis and the blades go up to about 1.5 terabytes or so. We fill them with a terabyte. We went from two c7000s, fully-populated, to one Synergy frame, half-populated. It frees up a lot of space.

It has also decreased our deployment time. When we stood up the hypervisors from images, it probably took us about three or four hours per hypervisor. With the VMM plugin that we have with it, all four of the new hypervisors we just deployed were done in about 30 to 45 minutes. As for our cost of operations, it has reduced our power consumption, at the very least. It has also reduced the time that we would put into a c7000.

It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes.

The networking is so easy. We came from c7000s and we had to deal a lot with Virtual Connect. The new networking stuff, the new OneView solution for Synergy, is probably the best part about it. We haven't upgraded it yet, but we're looking forward to updating it and seeing how easy that is compared to the c7000.

I would like the ability to have my storage components accessed from any other frame across the backplane. If we have a storage module and we run out of space in that frame, it'd be nice to be able to share it across the frames. You can do it with hyperconverged. Why can't you do it with Synergy?

The stability is pretty good. We had a DIMM fail from ECC memory. We didn't have any outage. It just isolated it off to the side. We have the remote support set up so they opened a ticket and had a guy out to us at 7:00 in the morning.

The scalability is pretty good. I think you can take it up to something like 21 frames if you really want to. We'll never have a use for that, but it seems pretty good.

Technical support was a little busy the last couple times I've had to contact them. It was a new product. Support wasn't bad, it was just a little slow.

Our c7000s were getting old, end-of-life, and we wanted to condense. We freed up a lot of space in our data centers lately, and that was part of it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. There's a learning curve to it, just like there is with anything else. There are "ifs," "and's," and "but's," but they cabled it up for us. It was pretty straightforward after that.

We bought it through our VAR, American Digital. But most of the people who came out were from HPE directly.

We haven't really computed ROI. It was more of a lifecycle replacement that we came across.

After buying it, I don't think there are any costs other than for regular support.

We looked a little bit at Nutanix. We looked at the Cisco UCS chassis too. We went with HPE mostly due to the fact that we're already an HPE shop. We already had OneView. We were pretty happy with the c7000s. They were always solid. Synergy seemed pretty mature. I'm not a huge fan of some of the marketing around it. It works very well for what it does. They try and build it up to be things that it's not, for most people.

It's a pretty good solution depending on what your use case for it is. If you're looking for a blade system, you're looking for density, and you're looking for something that's going to be easy for your guys to spin up and get going, have a look at Synergy.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to double-check the cables that your VAR orders for you, before the product arrives. Other than that, we've been happy with the product overall. It's one of those things where when it works, it works, and there are no complaints.

I give Synergy a nine out of ten. It works really well. We've had good results with it. The only problem is, as I said, the storage module doesn't share across the frames.

We use it for public cloud right now. It covers a plethora of workloads. We have everything from the small, mom-and-pop, five-user accounting shop running QuickBooks, all the way up to data analytics running machine-learning on it.

The main improvement has been around being able to expand the environment without building out additional infrastructure. We have the blade chassis set up. We throw an extra blade in there and we've just expanded our compute and ram. It's made it much easier for us to grow the infrastructure, once we put the foundation in place.

In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity. That's really is what it comes down to. We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with it.

The solution has helped us to implement new business requirements quickly. We deployed the 8180 processor from Intel with it, which helped us empower much faster compute. We have actually been able to pick up more of those machine-learning clients.

In addition, our IT infrastructure team is more efficient. We have fewer teams, fewer people associated with it. It has also affected the productivity of our development team, now. At the beginning, they didn't know how to utilize it, but now that they've been able to bridge into it a little bit more, it's sped them up.

For example, we run our own panel and customer-interface platforms which are built in-house. They bring stats from the compute node and they bring stats from the RAM utilization into a customer portal that is API-driven. That one was always very hard because all of the infrastructure that we'd stand up was a bunch of 1Us. When a new cluster would come in, they would have to write the code for that cluster and it would take them a week or two just to put the right code together and deliver it to the customer. Now they've written it for the whole Synergy platform, so we just slide a blade in and it comes online.

The solution has also decreased our deployment time. On average, we deploy a private cloud in about two weeks: Buying the nodes, racking and stacking, and then applying VMware to it. From there we, would install the OSs, etc. We've cut out the racking and stacking. We've cut out a lot of the physical deploy time. Now, we buy the blades and put them in an open slot. The networking is already set up, the infrastructure is already set up, so it's just VMware and the OSs, which cuts us down to about 60 percent of the time it used to take.

The most valuable feature is the control of the overall solution all in one box. With it being all together, it has really taken down the complexity of a multi-environment. Switches being top of rack, storage being separate. It's moved it all into one box.

There is room for improvement in the setup.

It's stable. It hasn't given us a problem yet. No outages.

It's very scalable. We like the idea that we can put four chassis in one of our racks, and we can connect up to 25 chassis, so the scalability to us, and being able to sync all those into one management portal, is unheard of. You can't really sync that many blades and chassis together in any other platform.

Technical support is good. We had a struggle at the beginning. What happened was that we reached out and they didn't really understand what we were trying to do. We got more of the leadership from HPE involved and said, "Hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish. We're trying to set up a solution." They put some more advanced technical support in place and were able to solve it in under 24 hours. That helped us in initially setting up the solution.

Our previous solution was 1U Dell EMC equipment. We were buying new equipment. we were also buying the 1U servers from HPE. But we needed a solution which had flexibility.

The initial setup was complex. We had a couple of bright engineers working on it, and they figured out a lot of things that they don't know. They don't always have experience around certain platforms. The problem was that they couldn't find documentation easily, to walk them through setup when they just didn't know the platform.

We used a reseller, TIG. Our experience with them was great. They facilitated getting us pretty much all the information we needed.

We have seen ROI. Building it to be so powerful, we had six racks of 1 to 2U servers of Dell EMC equipment spread out throughout the data center - six racks of gear. We were able to condense down into four blades, because they are so powerful. That's a huge ROI and savings for us.

It has also reduced our cost of operations. We have fewer teams focusing on the overall solution. We have a team of two right now, compared to the team of six or seven people assigned to the whole cloud solution in the past. From an operations perspective, we're probably saving a good $150,000 a year.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs, cutting out those racks. A rack costs me the square footage. Also, if I'm using a rack for my cloud, I can't sell it to a client. Moving six racks into one has saved me a ton of overhead on the infrastructure side.

In terms of TCO, I think we'll get there faster. While the blade is more expensive than a 1U-server - I'm going to buy a 1U server for $10,000 and it's going to support X number of clients - ultimately we get to the TCO faster because we're able to pack more into the density. That means our price per gig can be lower, but we make more margin on it, overall. We're able to get to that TCO faster because of the density that Synergy provides.

VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now.

We vetted out everything under the sun from the UCS side, the Cisco side, the Dell EMC side. They had new chassis coming out, chassis which hadn't been released yet, which they were showing me. 

We really landed on Synergy because it was the most flexible out of all the solutions. We were able to get the power we were looking for in the chassis. Our data center is really built on density. We can run 52 kW in a rack, but with all the other platforms we were limited on the amount of power we could push in there. We liked Synergy because we could put four chassis in, running two 8280 processors, and running 1.5 to 3 terabytes of RAM per blade, making it a super powerful, 42 to 50 kW cabinet. We couldn't do that with any other platform.

Most of the time, people look at our solution - the way we built Synergy - and they say, "Man, we don't need that much power. You built it with the highest processors you can buy, the most RAM you can put in there." I tell them it doesn't really matter, from a Synergy perspective, if you need a smaller solution, less RAM. Synergy is a good play for them, even though they don't need the powerhouse, because Synergy is a platform is solid. They could get gold processors, lower processors, put 512 of RAM in it, and the TCO for them would still be as good as we're getting.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the solution is that we should have gotten on it sooner. That is the main one. We weren't focusing heavily on our density before. Now we are. The thing we've learned is that for every new solution, whether it's storage or networking or whatever it is, we need to focus on the density side of things.

We did a big vetting of HPE's Pointnext services which helps move to the solution. We spent a ton of time on it because we really wanted to make it work. Unfortunately, since we're a service provider, the model didn't work for us, but we may use it for storage, so it could work out.

What does it not have? That's the harder question. Right now, it has everything we need. We don't really see anything, it doesn't have.

I'd rate Synergy a nine out of ten because, after it was done, it was almost perfect. It was getting it done, at the beginning, that was our biggest struggle.

We use Synergy for everything: Exchange, virtualization, and SQL. Most of our stuff is still on-premise. We are not really doing anything with hybrid cloud from Synergy right now.

It makes it easier to manage all of your infrastructure when it's more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the future proofing. As we buy new equipment, we are buying Synergy instead of continuing to buy c7000 blade enclosures and BL Series blades. Thus, I don't have to do a forklift upgrade in the future. 

Also, the increased speeds and feeds, as we went from multiple bonded 1 gig connections to 40 gig. That was huge, especially with our virtualization density. When you are running 50 VMs on one host, you really need the the speed behind it so you don't have issues.

Then, there are the ease of management and single pane of glass for everything. The single pane of glass management is huge, because in all our previous systems, depending on what we were managing, we would go to a different management point. Being able to go to one spot to get everything is helpful. I find that server profile creation is a lot easier in OneView than it was previously. We are able to stay compliant with firmware and updates, because we are assigning server profiles and reapplying them when there are changes. This makes everything a lot simpler.

For the storage modules, which can be put in a single frame, they currently can only be addressed to compute modules within the same frame. It would be nice to be able to use those to assign cross frame.

For the most part, the stability is really good. We had some challenges during the implementation and a few issues afterward, but they were all sort of related to how Synergy interacts with Nexus. Our Nexus on the network side is managed by another group, and they had just gotten Nexus, so they weren't really familiar with how Nexus even worked. Getting these two to interact well was the majority of our issues. It really didn't have anything to do with Synergy. It points to know the environment that you are putting it in and making sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's when you are figuring out what their requirements are to communicate.

The scalability is pretty huge. The compute modules and everything in the Synergy system scales up very well. It has much higher speeds and feeds than we had before.

We've done several engagements with the support from Synergy. They have all been really good engagements. The only thing that I can say which might be negative is they don't necessarily know about the Nexus connections either. However, once we got that figured out, it was good. We had several visits with engineers, when we had issues, who fixed everything. So, that was really good.

As an agency, we looking at the future constantly and evolving with what is coming out. We are really budget constrained, so continuing to operate in the same method over and over again until you realize that you have to make a change, that is really expensive. So, we are always looking for new, better ways to do things. We looked at the lifetime of the c7000 enclosures and realizing that they are not going to be around forever. We wanted to roll into something which was going to be around for a while. to avoid five or six years down the road having to do a forklift upgrade of all of our systems. This is sort of how we operate. To save ourselves in the future from having to make big changes, we can sort of easily roll into Synergy instead of having to go into it all at once.

I am sure that that initial setup was complex, but Pointnext made it look really easy.

We purchased it already configured in the rack, which was huge because you roll it into the data center, then everything is already cabled, except for your outside connections. This saves you at least two days, if not more, of putting the Legos together of the system. Then, we were able to plug the system into our network and immediately able to start to configure it. This maybe took two hours to fully configure a three-frame enclosure with 20 compute modules in it. That was extremely impressive.

Within the two hours, we were using the compute modules. Other than getting people to move off of their older servers into the frame, which is more of a business thing than technical, because you have to arrange outages, we were able to use the system immediately.

HPE Pointnext came out and did the initial configuration. Our experience with them was awesome. 

It has decreased our deployment time by about half, maybe a bit more. We used Altiris Rapid Deployment before on the c7000s, but as time went on, that platform didn't work very well anymore. Then, we were doing a lot of things manually. Even though, we were really good at doing that, it is a lot easier again to deal with a server profile or image. So, we easily cut that time down in half.

From the replacement costs versus the cost of the previous equipment, it has been much cheaper than previous gear. The performance and speed has enabled us to do more things that we weren't able to do before: Faster video streams, being able to have more hosts on a compute module, and have more efficiency all around, which has definitely paid for itself.

It is a more condensed physical footprint than our previous hardware. So, we're saving money on power and cooling. We have three power distribution panels. We have the utilization measure. We were at more than 90 percent utilization on our three panels. When we virtualized, including Synergy, that utilization went down to about 60 percent, which was pretty big. While it may not be fair to say that it was all Synergy, because there were other things involved too. We had all these individual fan units from another company, when we migrated to 3PAR, that took less power, which was also huge. There was a bunch of stuff going on during that power reduction, but Synergy was a big part of it.

Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more.

We do a biannual renewal. I know how much that renewal is, but I don't know how much it breaks down to be just Synergy, since we have our VMware, all of our physical equipment, etc. all rolled up into one renewal, which is a little over $300,000 every two years. However, only a subset of that is the Synergy product. 

There was at least about a 20 percent savings in cost over our purchase based on the purchase price of the compute modules themselves versus what we've had to pay before. It was significantly less.

I don't know if we compared anyone else. We have a very heavy blade-centric architecture right now. All of that knowledge and experience rolls right over into Synergy management. Whereas, with another vendor solution, it would not. We would be learning from ground zero. For us, it was more of an easier transition to Synergy than looking at another product.

I would definitely recommend buying it.

Most of the requirements of newer applications are based on the availability of newer technology. So, you need more speeds and feeds. You need more proxy, faster storage, and more RAM. The compute resources required for today's workloads and emerging workloads are greater than it was before. This platform is allowing us to meet those needs without having to go out and purchase more gear.

It doesn't really affect our development staff. Right now, their development environments aren't on Synergy. They are not actually using it yet. All of our production stuff is in Synergy. The development staff is using the old stuff still.

The biggest lesson learned is knowing what you are connecting Synergy to, because there are caveats there and not everything necessarily plays well with Synergy. Make sure you are talking to your HPE techs about what you need it to connect to and what is in your environment that will work well. Also, that they have tested it and proven it. Otherwise, you're going to be their guinea pig.

We use the solution for data centers. It supports hybrid cloud management tasks.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using HPE Synergy for over 20 years. We have the gold status partner of the solution.

Synergy is more stable than HP. I rate the solution’s stability a six or seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable. It can fit small businesses.

Whenever we call, we've got an answer.

Neutral

We have opted for Cisco.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes a week to complete. When you work with technology, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Synergy is more expensive than Cisco.

We don't find it valuable, and we don't use it; we're not profiting.

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

We use HPE Synergy for infrastructure virtualization.

It is better to build the virtualization environment in this manner. To be honest, it is flexible and powerful.

The solution's greatest strengths lie in its ability to maintain a high availability and combine networking with hyper channel connectivity into a single component.

There is always room for improvement.

Based on our use cases, I don't believe there are any additional features required.

I have been working with HPE Synergy for three years.

There are two versions of HPE Synergy, both known as Gen10. One is available only in hardware form, while the other is the Gen10 Plus, which has been recently released. However, we are currently using the 480 Gen10 version.

HPE Synergy is very stable.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

The implementation process is straightforward. It is not complex.

We had assistance from the vendor to deploy it.

The design and the physical setup are identical. As long as the configuration is done correctly, there should be no issues with operations such as patching and firmware updates.

I would rate HPE Synergy a ten out of ten.

I don't remember the models. However, there are Synergy nodes built in the cloud infrastructure with a design utilization. Some of the project was within two Synergy baskets with a full load installed.

The solution is stable. 

We didn't have any problems handling the initial setup.

You can scale the product.

Support is very helpful.

Maybe two years before, there were issues with drivers. However, the issues were always fixed quickly.

They were not so deep into integration with VMware. As a partner of VMware, I'm focused more on VMware products and I don't remember many details about HPE now that time has passed. However, there should be more integration. 

I used the solution for a while. I worked as a partner in a big integrated company, and we did some projects for this technology with this recruitment.

The solution is stable and reliable. There were no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale. We started one project from one basket and we added a second basket without any problems.

Technical support has been knowledgeable. Everybody is excellent.

Positive

I don't remember any problems handling the initial setup. Everything was described and really detailed in the documentation. 

We work with a really small team. Two guys handled the deployment and maintenance. It's not necessary to have a huge team to deploy and run the production.

We had help from the local HPE office. If we had any questions, we were able to ask the technical guys from the local HPE office. I don't remember if we had any really big issues.

I worked with the technology and never handled the licensing aspect. I'm not sure of the exact costs. 

Whether or not this is the right solution for a company depends on the use case. It's not really for everyone. I don't really want to recommend it to everyone. For some cases, it's a really good solution. For other cases with a high-density environment, it's not ideal.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.