HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

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.

The primary use case is really a replacement for the BladeCenter. Though, we would like our customers to see it more in the composable fashion that it has been positioned. The primary use case (as our customer see it) is they can't go further with BladeCenter, so they are choosing Synergy.

Traditionally, our customers have been using their BladeCenter, and now Synergy, to run any type of mid-tier applications or virtualized platforms that, for whatever reason, don't fit in the hyper-converged area. 

From a hybrid cloud perspective, Synergies are more seen for the potential of integrating into orchestrated and automated deployments, so they can have cloud-like functionality on-premise. They are not quite at that yet, and in the couple cases where we have deployed it, that has certainly been the goal.

We do have one customer who very specifically uses it for back office applications during the day (during business hours), then they will actually swap it into a scheduling facility at night. Therefore, those jobs that are running off hours can be used for it. So, we do actually have one customer who is doing that.

In another case, we have a customer who is heavily orchestrated, and we have written a significant number of automation tools for them. In that case, we are in the process of PoC'ing that automation process and tying that into the orchestration tools. Whereas in the past, both their hyper-converged environment, as well their ProLiant rack servers and their BladeCenter, would not tie very well into the orchestration.

Productivity of deployment goes back to the automation tie-ins and fluidity of the resource. If they can reuse componentry, knowing they can do that based on a temporal basis, and they have some type of scheduling facility, then this makes it significantly easier.

It has the next level beyond hyper-converged:

1. It has that promise of combining the orchestration and automation.
2. Being able to no longer have an isolated bare metal environments, then converged infrastructure with virtualized environments. The ability to have both platforms in one infrastructure. Then, simultaneously have the ability to go between them and isolate workloads while still having shared workloads. That sort of mix and match and fluidity of being able to reassign.

Secondarily, the temporal value of it. If I only need a particular amount of compute for a specific period of time during business hours, then at night, I'm running a bunch of batch jobs, or doing something else, that ability to swap a profile, swap templates, and have compute assigned to something else, saves significant amount of money. As long as you are tying it into the automation and orchestration layers, it becomes much easier to do.

Continue the playbooks with the automation integrations. More of that would be good, as it has been great so far. 

I would really like to see the type of hardware add-on operationalization made simpler in some way. How do I have a chassis and add in a second or third chassis, but not have to be so aware that it is number 11 versus number 12 within the frame? If they can address that, it would be a home run.

Continue the path of integrating OneView into a single product. A lot of different people have different OneView experiences based on which product they have used it for.

In the past, there has been some question around the stability of networking components of it. It has been a long time since HPE has had a significant server issue, but from the networking component and newer networking components, there have been significant improvements from the past.

I love the idea of Synergy and its ability to scale out. Operationally, it is a little bit challenging to manage at this point. When you add onto it, you have to be very aware of where you are in the frame, on your count, and what components. You may have to move a satellite module or you may have to reallocate componentry, which is already there. That scale aspect is challenging. From a hardware perspective, it is not transparent.

From a scalability within existing resources, it is very scalable and much easier to use. E.g., I have deployment requests coming down from some orchestration layer and just need to add available resources and compute.

In a couple cases, it was really just sort of that end of life of BladeCenter. In another case, they saw the temporal value aspect and the customer thought that swapping would make a ton of sense.

There is more to keep in mind with Synergy. Remember that our customers are coming from BladeCenters. Where after 10 to 15 years of it, and everybody found it fairly simple at this point, then they have this new paradigm of scaling out to many multiple frames, and so many more modules. It is a change in mindset. Therefore, some people will say that it is complex simply because of that. It is not that difficult though.

We deploy with the help of HPE consultants. Our experience with the HPE consultants is very positive. They have been all over it, more so than the customer even.

For temporal use, when you throw on the fact that you're essentially doubling your capacity, right there you could claim a 50 percent TCO reduction. As far as ROI, that becomes a lot harder because it is dependent on the level of automation that you have built into that reallocation as you are introducing a step that wasn't there before either, where as you would have just built two different infrastructures and the cost would have been upfront. So, the ROI is really in the reduction of total costs.

It still sort of comes up occasionally against some of the HCI competitors, but it's a totally different approach.

Synergy is chosen based on that mix of being able to do bare metal, multiple types of virtualization and the fluidity of the resource rather than it being all virtualized, then fluidity.

Focus on the fluidity of resources and view everything from that lens. Always remember that is the justification for some of the complexity. Once you can set it up appropriately, it will be worth it. If you view it purely from a non-fluid, assign this - just like you would a blade, then you may find it more complex, and in some cases, more expensive to manage.

Right now, there are pros and cons to whether it is affecting our customer's IT infrastructure. It is probably net neutral because there are some complexity from an operationalization aspect that increases compared to what they're used to. Being able to know what number frame it is within the Synergy frame. Operationally you are ordering different parts differently based on where you are in that count. That adds a certain complexity to them managing it on a growth and scale perspective. So, you are sort of giving up one efficiency to get the other right now. That is something that will be addressed better over time, and it is even better than it was two years ago already.

It hasn't proven to implement new business requirements quickly, but it certainly has that promise. In its worst case, it is just another hardware-centric solution. In its best case, the customer will have the automation tie-in to actually make this happen.

Biggest lessons learnt:

1. You should be aware of your workloads from a time basis, which means you need to be monitoring and analyzing those workloads more. 
2. The absolute necessity of automation.

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.

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.

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.