HPE Synergy Reviews

It is where we do most of our compute for the various different things for our homegrown software that we developed and use. We also use the product for a third-party software that we do, using cloud-based services. 

In a hybrid cloud environment, the solution enables us to a lot of databases, then different homegrown in-house developed stuff that we use for media servers and compression servers. We can also do management for workforces and optimization for workforces, in terms of the products that we provide.

We can get more density in the same physical footprint out of it, which has to do more with the density of the blades that go into the Synergy frames, because you can get less blades than you could with the old c7000s. There are just more cores and sockets with more memory available, so you can get denser with your applications. 

We build out a whole stack at one time, so we don't have to worry about it until that stack is full, then that gives us time to get the next one ready.

You don't have to have networking in every single frame, just have the interconnects. You don't have the traditional A and B side in the sort of multiple LAG groups, and so you really can sustain a lot of loss. The other side of that is if you need to sort of push more bandwidth up, you can do it because of the interconnects in the networking, and the same goes for Fibre Channel as well.

The speed in OneView and how it updates the entire configuration needs improvement. If they can do that, and it could be a little more clear on what impact different actions will have for certain things, that would be good. They do give warnings for certain things, but there are other things where they don't really give you a warning, then you do it and it will be rebooting something like the host (or whatever). If that is in a production environment, that is really dangerous. This is our pain point.

We haven't really had any problems once it was set up. The initial installation can sometimes be problematic.

We have had some weird issues with the networking and interfaces. We had an interface where if it was the first interface to join a LAG group it wouldn't come up, but if it joined second, third, or fourth, then it worked fine. We still haven't figured that one out.

The amount of time that it takes to update the entire configuration because it has to go and update so much stuff: It takes quite a long time. Then, the potential for downtime when you do that is also problematic, especially if you don't have a full three or five frame set that you are working with. If you are going from one frame to two frames or two frames to three frames there is a potential for downtime there. So, we have opted to go to full stacks when we implement them.

It is scalable. You can manage with OneView multiple frame sets. We have chosen not to do that right now, but I can see where, as we get bigger, we'll want to implement that and maybe change the frame link up a bit so we can do that. However, we haven't done that right now.

The technical support was pretty good. They were good to very good, depending on the issue.

We had the c7000, and there wasn't anything new. We needed to move forward, so we could have a platform that we could rely on for the next ten or so years. Something that we could go and deploy, taking advantage of all the functions that it has.

The initial setup was definitely different from what we were used to, so there was a learning curve. However, the more experience that we gain with it, the easier that it becomes. Every implementation has been sort of faster and easier than the previous one. We are to the point now where it is pretty straightforward for us.

We used startup services for the deployment. The frustration with that was it was contracted out to third-party vendors, so it was sort of hit or miss for what you get with third-party vendors in terms of their knowledge. That was a bit frustrating. 

We will probably always buy the startup services. However, we will do the rack and stack along with most of the wiring in terms of the network and Fibre Channel. Then, we will let them run the interconnects through the actual configuration of the enclosure itself with the startup services links.

We did look at Cisco UCS only because we thought it might be a good time to change things up, but we are really an HPE shop.

Make sure that it will work for you, your environment, what you have in mind, and what you want to accomplish. If you have a lot of small points of presents which are located around the world, this may not the best solution. However, if you are in a big data center or colocated data center, and you will be doing a lot of deployments, then I think this is a good solution.

Right now, we are mostly configuring profiles, the configuration of the frame sets, and the logical enclosure groups manually. We are moving towards having Synergy help us manage our IT landscape. That is what we are trying to get to next.

We are not using it as a fully composable infrastructure because we have storage outside of Synergy. It is sort of a hybrid of what we were doing before and what composable infrastructure really is, so that is where we are at.

It hasn't decreased our deployment time yet, but it can potentially in the future. We are trying to get not only to servers that we deploy, but the infrastructure that deploys the servers. We want to get to the point where that is all configured and deployed using infrastructure as code. We are a long ways from that, but that is where we want to get, and hopefully, we will get there.

It was the next generation of what was possible versus the old stuff where it was very confined to one frame versus multiple frames or you could make it composable and move workloads around easier.

We don't really have Synergy for our development environment.

Biggest lesson learnt: Pay attention to the nuances it. Take advantage of all the stuff which is built into the system. A lot of times, we buy technology and only use one part of it. If you use sort of the whole suite, then it works better. 

Right now, we are mostly using it for building out data center services. The biggest things that we are using it for are large scale virtual farms. We have recently even started using it to have large shared database resources for shared platforms, like Informatica.

We are just using it as a server.

It is helping us sort of bridge a gap that we are having moving off of old legacy systems, like HP-UX systems and trying to move over to x86. So, it is helping fill a hardware gap that a lot of our platforms have needed in the past.

It is filling a gap in server size that we don't really have right now in previous generations.

I would like them to work more on the templates, targeting it to a larger scale organization which has to run 24/7. Maybe they can try to get that workload to target certain parts of an application that has to be on 24/7. The common example that we keep getting is with our animators. They have one template which is dedicated to their resources, and in the night, it does rendering. However, when we have stuff which is running 24/7, it's not really something that applies. So, maybe they can try finding more applicable use cases.

The solution has affected the productivity our deployment a little, but it has just been the normal getting used to the new system. I think once they get used to it, it will be fine.

It seems pretty stable. We haven't had any issues that I'm aware of. We have not had any outages.

Just considering how we're using it, we are really using it for the bare bones infrastructure. I think if we were using Synergy in probably the way that most teams or organizations were expected to use it, it probably scales a lot better for us because we are looking at it the bare bones CPU memory and how it works. 

Scaling is difficult, but that's always going to be the case.

I don't work with the technical support.

We started moving data centers, so we had to invest in a new solution.

The initial setup was complex. From what I was told, there were issues initially with getting the SFPs on the floor for our data center and something with the image, but I think that was on our service provider' side. They couldn't get the image to deploy with the right drivers and stuff.

We worked directly with HPE.

We have not yet seen ROI.

It has not yet reduced our cost of operations.

It has not yet reduced our IT infrastructure cost.

I would recommend that anybody who does look at Simplicity to look into Synergy. Look into it before they deploy. They should look and make sure it is compatible for their environment.

At the scale that we are at, we don't really have too many use cases right now where we can leverage all the technologies behind it. So, it's unfortunate but we are looking forward to getting to that point. We just have to slowly bridge that gap.

It is fulfilling our needs. It is not doing anything that has been too different than how we're already using it. Because of how we are using it as a bare bones servers, we just see it as a server.

We just haven't really integrated it into the public cloud or hybrid cloud. We are testing out Simplicity and Nimble now, so that might already be a feature.

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.

We were evaluating it to replace some of our older infrastructure. We have Dell M1000e Blade chassis. We were doing a proof of concept for the last three months with it.

It would cover all kinds of workloads. We have Oracle Databases, we have SQL databases, we have web servers. There's a VMware environment with VMs that manage all sorts of workloads.

In our case, it would not be an improvement over the way our company functions. We have unique scaling demands. Our storage demands scale very differently than our compute demand scales. So doing HCI anything doesn't really fit well, currently, with how we operate. But that's why we were testing it. We were trying to figure out how can we scale it, or can we scale it, so that it fits within what we're currently required to do. We are not going to be able to do HCI currently. We're looking at other solutions.

The most valuable feature, personally, is that I'm already very familiar with OneView because we manage 3PAR storage as well. Having familiarity with OneView and the 3PAR infrastructure, and being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform, are the most valuable aspects to me.

If it would be possible to connect clusters of five with other clusters, so that they could all share resources, that would change the game for us. It would make it a viable solution for us.

There is room for improvement with support. That's a big one because of the struggle we had getting the technical expertise which we needed. Improving support is hard to do. It's a global company. They've got disparate teams with disparate specialties all over the place and it's a very new product. So we tried to take all that into account when we were evaluating. In the end, before you push a product out, your support has to know how it works and how to support it.

It is very stable. We didn't have any problems with the stability at all.

Obviously, it's very scalable. You're limited to five total - not chassis, they call them something else - but you're limited to five. So it is scalable to a point. But that's where we run into our problems because we need all of our servers in our infrastructure to have access to my storage. We can't segment out storage and have it only available to these five chassis.

We did use technical support and I would rate it poorly. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it a five. It wasn't terrible, but it's the fact that it's such a new product and it doesn't seem like even the people who are supposed to be supporting it really understand it yet. 

We went around and around in circles on one particular issue for about two weeks and it was a simple "check the box" in this area. When we finally checked the box, everything started working, but it took us two weeks to figure that out with their help.

The solution we have now works but, like technology always has, it gets old and then you have end-of-life, end-of-support and you have to make other choices. Everybody's going HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, so we're trying to evaluate that.

Configuration was difficult because it's so new. Even the people at HPE weren't well-versed on how to configure it correctly. So it took a lot longer to configure than we thought it would. But once we got it configured, it functioned very well.

It took us about a month to get it configured, to get all the bugs worked out. Then we were able to utilize it for about two months as part of our proof of concept.

Ninety percent of it was straightforward. The ten percent that was complex was only complex because it's not very intuitive. You have to know where to go within OneView to find the options that you need. And because it's not intuitive, it's not easy for someone who has never done it before to do it. And it wasn't easy for the people who were supposed to know how to do it, either.

We had HPE consultants and a VAR. We had about six people, four from HPE, two from our VAR, and our whole team working on it for a month to try to deploy it. It was a struggle.

We're also looking at the Dell EMC MX chassis. When we finished our HPE proof of concept, we started the Dell EMC proof of concept. That's what we're doing currently.

The biggest lesson I learned personally, using Synergy, was that it takes quite a while to properly evaluate something as complex as Synergy. Two weeks in, I was ready to just say, "This as a piece of junk and I never want to use it." But two months in, it was actually working really well and I was trying to figure out how we could make it work in our environment. It takes a while, but if you can get it set up right and get a little bit of expertise in it, it's a wonderful platform.

My advice would be to take your time. Get very familiar with it and make sure it's going to meet the needs that your business has, because it may not. Or maybe it fits perfectly. If you don't take the time to really study it then you won't know, and you don't want to get stuck. That's would be an expensive mistake to make.

The product is well-designed and engineered. They've thought through a lot of the things that were problems with the c7000 chassis, for example, and they've made a lot of improvements. From an engineering perspective, I would give it an eight out of ten. It might be right for all workloads but it's not right for all environments. Our environment is one of those that doesn't fit well with HCI.

It's our day-to-day production device. We deploy our workloads and VMs in clusters on it.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly, by using the Composer for efficiency. It has also improved the productivity of our development team due to the efficiency of being able to deploy via Composer. We're able to deploy development environments rapidly. We have seen about a 25 percent reduction in deployment times.

Ease of use.

It's absolutely reliable. Zero outages.

It's easily scalable.

Technical support is solid. We really haven't had issues with it, so we haven't had to go down that path much yet.

We had aging gear. We went from c7000s into Synergy.

The initial setup was straightforward. We met them at the data center for four days. We racked, stacked, and deployed it. They showed me the ropes. It was easy.

We used an integrator/reseller. They were solid.

We've seen ROI through density and capacity into it. Where I had four c7000 chassis running a lot of standalone stuff, I was able to consolidate a lot of that and virtualize it. It has reduced our cost of operations and IT infrastructure costs, the latter by about 50 percent. With aging gear that needed long-term maintenance, consolidating into a chassis or two reduced maintenance costs.

We went with Synergy because it was the best-in-breed and the next generation, from the existing c7000s. We're exclusively an HPE shop, so we didn't really fish around.

Definitely go with it. Use this product. It's best-in-breed. The biggest lesson we've learned from using this solution is to continue using this solution.

I would give it a nine out of ten for sure because it's 100 percent reliable and for the ease of use. I seldom give anything a ten. There's always room for improvement, I'm just not thinking of a specific feature or two that are missing, but there is certainly a feature or two missing.

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.