HPE Synergy Reviews

We primarily use the solution for VM virtualization and Oracle standardization.

The virtualization is very good.

We find it quite useful for the Oracle Database.

The solution is stable.

We've found the scalability to be reasonable if you are ready to invest in it.

Technical support is excellent.

The connectivity needs to be improved. The compatibility with old infrastructure and networking should be better than what it is now. The networking part is very complex. It should be simplified.

The setup was a bit complex.

They need to make it easier for firmware upgrades. The virtual connection is very complex and they need to make it easier. 

The storage configuration should be improved. When we are connecting the 3PAR storage to Synergy, I have to manually add the values again when what should be happening is, when I'm connecting, when I'm assigning, the storage should be automatically allocated.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The product offers good stability. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance is good.

I have had some issues regarding scalability. It's scalable, however, the thing is we need to purchase hardware. You need to be ready for an investment when scaling.

Technical support has been great. We're quite satisfied with the level of support we get. The assistance they offer is perfect.

We found the initial setup to be a bit complex. It wasn't exactly straightforward and simple. It would be ideal if they could simplify the process in the future to make it easier.

The deployment took about one business day.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We are using the HPE Synergy Composable Solution.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

It's useful for virtualization, and we run all our applications in HPE Synergy.

I like that it's suitable for virtualization. It's also stable and scalable. The newer version has a lot of memory, and you don't have to worry about updates.

The performance could be better. The converged network cards initially didn't work. However, later on in the newer version, they came up with 50 GB network cards to replace the 20 GB ones, and it's perfectly fine now. At times, it could also be more stable.

I have been using HPE Synergy since 2018.

HPE Synergy is stable.

HPE Synergy is a scalable composable infrastructure. We have 12 networks and about 1,500 users on the networks.

I have contacted technical support whenever it was required.

The initial setup was very easy. I installed and deployed this solution within a day. We have one engineer managing and maintaining this solution.

I implemented this solution by myself.

We don't have to pay for Synergy because it's part of our plan.

I evaluated a lot of options like Dell, Nutanix, and more before choosing HPE Synergy.

I would recommend this solution to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE Synergy a ten.

The stability of the solution is very reliable. 

The solution can scale up if a company needs it to.

The initial setup is very easy and quite straightforward.

I've found the user experience to not be that great. It's something that they could really improve on. They need to make it more user-friendly.

The profiles aren't so easy to work with.

We find the agility to be lacking.  

I've been using the solution for the past few years. I've used it for a while and have some time to get to know the product. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. It's reliable. The performance is great.

The solution scales very well. If a company can expand it, it can do so. 

Few people are using it now. Previously, we had many more users. Right now, we may have a few hundred users. 

We've never used technical support. We've never really had a need to reach out to the technical team. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

I also have experience working on Cisco products. While HPE is a good solution, I do find Cisco to be a bit better.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not complex or overly difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues.

I'm a customer and an end-user. I don't have a business relationship with HPE.

My understanding is that we are on the latest version of the solution at this time. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I would advise if you need to choose between this solution and Cisco, that Cisco might be a better option. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are primarily using this product to build a private cloud infrastructure.

While it is difficult for me to state how the product has improved my organization without making use of a comparative frame of reference, I can state that it has enabled us to centralize all administrative tasks. 

What I find most valuable about this product are the number of interface combinations made possible with a single computer node. Secondly, I would rate the ease of configuration.

As concerns room for improvement, the number of levers in the system should be addressed. Technical solutions should be made easier. The advice I would give is that HPE Synergy increase the availability of the deployment. 

We have been using the product for one year.

I have not been using high speed for long enough to give an adequate rating of the product's stability. 

I consider this product extremely scalable. A single view allows for tremendous management capabilities. 

I have had to make use of technical support for one or two problems concerning product deployment. I had to instruct them to use their headphones. Only at this point did they give me results and they were not good. I had to request to be escalated and this was time consuming. The last issue for which I had to turn to technical support involved the apparent loss of a compute node on one of the computers. 

Previously, we used an IBM Blade Server and, subsequently, the IBM system. 

The initial setup was complex and this can take around three weeks to a month. 

I do integration on behalf of the customer. 

I cannot properly advise on setup, pricing or licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options before settling on HPE Synergy and, besides, this decision was not in my purview to make. 

The entire company and all its customers are utilizing this product. Plans are in place for future upgrades. 

I would rate HPE Synergy an eight out of ten. 

Most of our use cases are under NDA. I can't speak to how specific clients use it.

Use cases can vary by quite a bit. Generally, companies can use it as a computing system, as a database, or for virtualization. There are very different use cases that can be covered by this product.

The product is mostly stable.

The solution is built very well. It's very robust and durable.

The installation is straightforward.

If a customer would like to, they have the opportunity to buy technical support licenses.

In the past, I have had issues with configurations.

I've been doing installations for a while at this point. Likely, it's been about a year.

The product is mostly stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable. I haven't had any issues with the hardware. It's a well-built product and it's durable.

I wouldn't describe this solution as scalable as it is hardware. It's scalable inside the chassis. However, I have not tried to scale it yet. I don't really have experience in this aspect.

We have four clients that are currently using the solution.

I don't have any experience with technical support. That's handled on the customer side. If they have issues with the solution, they would contact HPE directly. I'm just an installer.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. An organization probably wouldn't have too many issues. I have struggled with the configuration aspect, however. That can be a bit difficult.

I cannot remember exactly how long the deployment takes in its entirety. It's maybe an hour or so, for the physical installation. After that, the deployment and configuration depend on the organization and its requirements. Sometimes it's a couple of hours. Sometimes it takes two days.

You only really need two people for deployment and maintenance.

I handle the installations for clients. I'm an integrator.

You can purchase support licenses for this product. Those would need to be paid on a yearly basis.

I'm an integrator and I mostly deal with solution hardware. I also use HPE Rack.

I install the latest versions of the solution.

I would recommend the solution as it is very well built. As a chassis, I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

We are resellers of HPE Synergy and I'm the CTO. 

Synergy has great data storage and it's a storage module. It's very good for software defined solutions. For example, customers needing a large data solution can use Synergy with blade and storage modules, but in a VMware environment for database solutions, Synergy is not useful. The important thing is the application - I think Synergy is a very good solution in some cases, but not for general purpose solutions or mixed environments, such as VM and physical environments that require larger storage.

I think the main issue with Synergy is a topology that HPE defines to connecting and creating a cluster. There are satellites and interconnecting modules which should interconnect with one special topology. If you want to change that and add another shelf in the cluster you have to change everything. I think it's very, very complex. But for example, in UCS, you have fabric interconnects, USC blades connect to fabric interconnects. It allows you to add more and more USC blades to the fabric interconnect. There is no connectivity between blades chassis. In Synergy, there are many connections between the blades chassis and I think that's the main issue. The other thing is that Synergy has a composer module that OneView runs on and which manages that cluster. I don't like HPE softwares. I think, for example, in comparison, the UCS manager is the better solution for managed blades than OneView. OneView is not as strong for that

It would be helpful if Synergy would add Cisco networking products, and network models in CSG, C 7000, maybe Blade models, software Cisco products, for example, b 22, CISCO B22 modules. I think the number of customers that use Cisco in their data centers is more than the customers that use HPE solutions. Because of that, I think HPE should add Cisco products and network modules to Synergy - I think that would be a good idea. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

Although the setup is complex, once it's up and running, the product is stable. 

The scalability is very complex. In Cisco, you connect everything to fabric interconnect. You can attain the blades on their fabric interconnect so scalability is one of main issues in Synergy.

Because of the cabling between FLM modules and a composer, the initial setup is complex. We are more familiar with IPv4 than IPv6. I think the initial setup is more complex than for UCS or c7000.

This is a good solution but it has some issues. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the Synergy Frame to host the main infrastructure for a big project. We have multiple Synergy Frames that are all managed by a single OneView interface.

The uptime and the performance meet our expectations, plus the integration with 3PAR is very good.

The OneView installed on the Composers has a very friendly user interface, which helps to manage the compute modules in the frame, compared to management used in legacy technologies.

The Online firmware update for the virtual connects has minimized our downtime windows.

The features we found most valuable are:

• Using only two virtual connect modules to support network for multiple frames
• Ease of management using the OneView Composer
• Online firmware update for the Virtual Connects, which are part of a single logical interconnect module

The OneView has improved a lot throughout the years with the release of the Synergy and OneView version 4, although it still has issues. The stability and smoothness of firmware upgrades for the compute modules can be improved by enabling full composability of the Synergy Frame.

We have been using this solution for two years.

This solution is very stable.

Our impression of the scalability is very good in terms of Composer and virtual connects, since you need only two of each for multiple frames.

Technical support for this solution has a very good initial response; however, escalation takes time, and most of the time the first level of support cannot solve your case.

We used a different solution previously, but we switched because of the ease of management, and in addition, this solution is future proof.

The initial setup is done by a partner and it is straightforward, but it takes time.

Our deployment was handled by a Vendor Team, and they are very experienced.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution, including Dell PowerEdge M1000e and Cisco UCS.

My suggestion is to go with HPE Synergy Composer v2 once it is released. 

Have HPE support with you while doing hardware upgrades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.