HPE Synergy Reviews

Our primary use case is virtual desktop infrastructure. We use them to run VMware Horizon View for engineering applications and higher-end desktop users.

The primary workload is workstations using NVIDIA Tesla cards. It helps our engineering students to run CAD applications no matter where they are on campus, instead of having to go to a lab to do it.

The biggest example is that, instead of having to buy a bunch of workstations - 29 or 30 for a room - we can just implement 50 VDIs and students can use them anywhere. Students don't particularly like to come to a lab just to do work. They like to work collaboratively. This gives them the ability not only to do that, but it also gives them the ability to do it in a classroom. Even if they're in a regular classroom, they have access to higher-performance machines to do simulations and that kind of stuff.

In terms of our IT landscape, it's self-managing. It's self-contained. And because it's OneView, it's the same management interface as we use for the rest of the infrastructure, so I only have to learn one tool.

When it comes to implementing new business requirements, if they need more machines, or the number of students increases in that particular discipline, it's very easy to replicate our current machines. Getting things online and being able to provide those workstations is much faster. Once we have it up and running, to deploy new virtual machines there is probably a 90 percent decrease in the time needed to get them up to speed.

Also, as far as the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team goes, we don't have a lot of bodies on our team. The easier things are and the more consistent they are, the more we can do more with less.

In addition, Synergy has reduced our cost of operations. It costs less to run that infrastructure than 40 to 50 standalone workstations. I would say our total cost of ownership is decreasing.

The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want.

Set up is easy. If I need to add additional capacity, I can just slide new blades in and get the profiles from the previous ones. It's easy to expand.

I'd like to see the firmware updates, as well as the built-in OneView and imager in Composer, become a little more powerful and faster.

I would expect that newer blades that would go in it would have newer processors and be faster. It's pretty flexible with storage. There are new solutions on the storage front, that are going into it as well. I expect that portfolio to increase, just like with the rest of the solutions they have.

Other than that, I think everything's great.

It's been very stable. We've had no issues. It's been rock-solid.

It easily scales. You can put three frames in a rack and they all interconnect, so it's not an issue there.

Technical support is very good. We haven't really had to use it a lot, but the times we have had to use it, it's been very good.

We came to a point where we had to start replacing a bunch of workstations. We sat down and thought about what the best path forward would be and what flexibility we wanted in the product. Once we worked through that, this solution was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward. We've been using HPE products for a long time. We've been using blade servers for a while. We were coming off a c7000 solution, so it was really easy to understand what they were doing and just jump right in. It wasn't a big, major shift. Just an evolution to a better product.

We used a reseller - NWN. Our experience with them has been very good.

We have seen a huge ROI. Instead of having to buy 50 workstations - and we didn't have room for them, where we would need another classroom or another area - we didn't have to invest in any of that. Air conditioning was already taken care of. Power was already taken care of because it's in the data center, so we didn't need to worry about outfitting a classroom with furniture, new workstations, and everything else.

We've been an HPE shop for a long time, so we really didn't have any other vendors. We knew everything was rock-solid. It was an environment that we were comfortable with. All my staff is trained in it and it didn't make any sense for us to really look at any other product.

But honestly, I don't think there's any other product that is at that level today. Most products are probably two to three years behind. I had no problems. I was very comfortable with it.

Make sure you understand the whole solution. If you're used to doing things the old, manual way, make sure you understand what OneView does, and how it can automate and orchestrate bringing the platform up to speed, and then, what happens after that. If you do that, you'll easily see that it's a big time-saver and it's much easier to manage.

The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that it is a lot simpler than what I thought it was going to be like, when we were going to deploy.

I would rate Synergy as ten out ten because

• it's easy to use
• rock-solid
• straightforward to deploy
• easy to expand.

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 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're using it for our production server loads and for disaster recovery purposes. In terms of a hybrid-cloud environment, we use it for our database workloads. We have records management systems and dispatch systems which have critical databases which we run on these platforms.

Using the platforms along with server virtualization has made us so much more agile in bringing up environments for projects. We've been able to cut delivery times down drastically. Whereas in the past, if someone said they need a server it was going to take a week, now, we're able to do that in 30 minutes to an hour. That's one example of how the solution helps us to implement new business requirements more quickly. Having the virtualization layer over top means that now, when projects come up and they need servers, we can have those up and running within a day. In the past, it could have taken several weeks to procure the physical equipment and get it built and installed.

On a typical server build, it probably saves eight hours. In our environment, we could be building and tearing down dozens of servers a week so just do the math on that. It's hundreds of hours in savings.

When it comes to managing our IT landscape, in addition to the flexibility, maintenance activities have also been improved. Being able to maintain the hardware layer without actually impacting our users has been key for us.

Synergy also streamlines the work that our infrastructure teams have to do. They configure things once, upfront, and build deployment templates. That, along with good documentation, means any member of the team, with very little training, is able to deploy systems.

The development team is our customer. They have rapidly changing needs in terms of getting servers and environments set up quickly for them to be able to do tests; and then to be torn down afterward. The fact that it's so flexible and easy to do that speeds things up for them as well.

The flexibility to link them together and configure them gives us the ability to scale out easily, to add more compute resources as needed. With the nature of our business, we have so many projects on the go and constantly changing priorities. A lot of times we need to be able to make changes fairly quickly. The way that they're scalable and flexible means we can add additional servers in quickly. That's what is important for us. We're not spending a lot of time doing procurement and building of physical servers.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any major outages so far. We are still on some of the older BladeSystem c7000 enclosures. We're moving to Synergy although we've yet to move everything completely on to them. But so far, Synergy has been good and stable.

It's a good platform. It gives us the scalability that we need.

I haven't personally used technical support.

Synergy was just the next logical step for us, as we lifecycle out our old infrastructure. We've been using HPE technologies for 15 to 20 years. The next logical step, as our older blade enclosures reached end-of-life, was to go to the Synergy platform. We work with our HPE sales team very closely. They're more like a strategic partner for us. When they make a recommendation we take it seriously.

There was a certain level of complexity to this because this was the first time for our staff in using this platform. There was some complexity. There are different options for the interfaces for the staff. It's a little bit different than what they're used to doing on the onboard administrator for the other blade enclosure. It was a matter of getting to know the new features. They took their time to understand all the capabilities.

We did it with HPE Consultant Services. Our experience with them is always good. Very thorough. They have local resources onsite who have good knowledge of the product. They're able to answer our questions. It's always been a good experience.

The price point is a little high. We were able to get a good deal on a promotion, to go with it. It would be nice to see the prices come down a little bit.

My advice would be to set up a face-to-face meeting with the product experts from HPE. If you go through resellers or vendors that's fine, but make sure you have the HPE resources there. They know the product the best.

One of the lessons we've learned from using this solution is that you really need to take your time and learn the new features of these. There's so much. It's not just a simple blade enclosure and you plug your servers in and go. There are a lot of advanced features, with some of the composability stuff that we haven't even really scratched the surface of. The big lesson is to really learn the product and what it can do for you, because chances are it can do a lot more than what you initially think.

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.

The primary use case is virtualized workloads. The workload are typically packages and things that run on Linux. They are just general-purpose, virtualized workloads.

Synergy is a flexible product, so it helps us to manage our IT landscape in a more simplified, structured way.

Once we get it in, it should help us implement new business requirements quickly.

Capabilities, such as, the automated updates and integration with OneView, will ultimately help us run more resilient infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the evolution of our existing HPE portfolio, the integration with our existing tool sets, and the enhanced capabilities that OneView bring.

The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient. A spreadsheet seems a bit out-of-date

So far, the stability has been good. It has been rock solid.

One of the main reasons that we have invested in Synergy was its scalability capabilities. It hooks back into the toolsets, which means you can manage vast amounts of infrastructure from one place, essentially.

We haven't had to use the technical support yet.

It was an evolutionary step for us. We have a lot of c7000 chassis, which was the precursor to Synergy. So, we used it as an evolutionary step because you could run it in blade format, as well as starting to make use of the more composable nature of it in the toolsets and features.

It has been very straightforward to set up. We have had no real problems. Even from the onset, it's helped us out with stuff quickly.

We used Tech Data for our deployment. They were very knowledgeable and quick to help us.

Our investment should return fairly swiftly.

We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff.

We looked at a composable system from Dell EMC. That was about the only one that is in the same type of league as Synergy.

Synergy is an established product, which is the main reason that we went with it. At a time, Dell EMC had just released the PowerEdge MX7000. We are a more established HPE partner already. We received a good price and have a lot of support from HPE and the partner. We also bought an HPE Nimble at the same time, as well. The two products went together quite nicely.

Take the time to understand the ecosystem and all of the capabilities, then use that to leverage further capabilities down the road.

The more that we use it, the better that we will understand it.

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.