HPE Synergy Reviews

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.

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.

The primary use case is for processing our analytics platform. The solution enables us to do all of our analytic workflows in a hybrid cloud environment.

The processing time has been about 50 times faster and allows us to do AI models.

The solution has helped us implement new business requirements quickly with new audience requests because Synergy's compute power when combined with 3PAR has been really terrific.

We have had very low infrastructure requirements because of its simple setup. It has helped us dramatically improve our SLAs.

The manageability is its most valuable feature. It is a fully managed platform, which is very simple to manage. It lets us set up servers quickly.

It allows us to have better throughput.

I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure.

Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent.

So far, it has been very stable. We've only had to reboot it once.

We like the scalability. being able to drop new nodes into the rack.

The technical support has been very good. 

Our old solution was too slow, and we were at risk of losing client jobs.

I would have purchased the product sooner, but it didn't exist.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there.

We used an HPE partner for the deployment. They were terrific.

We have absolutely seen ROI: The number of jobs processed and being able to process jobs within the allotted time frame, so we have not lost any jobs. Thus, the solution has certainly paid for itself.

The solution decreased our deployment time. It only took 10 percent of the time.

We outright purchased Synergy. 

Our TCO has been affected by five percent.

HPE and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We chose HPE Synergy because it was the superior solution.

It handles everything that we are looking to do.

Consider using it in conjunction with Nimble.

Biggest lesson learned: Be more on top of what HPE products and solutions are available.

We are using it for SQL servers on HPE servers. We use the service across the company. We are in three countries. It serves all our users.

All our internal applications are on an SQL server. It improves performance when we use all applications on this one server.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly with some app deployments.

Compatibility and scalability are its most valuable features.

You set it up and forget about it.

I would like more storage with this solution, because we still need 3PAR or other storage outside the box for the amount of data that we have.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very good, but I'm still trying to scale more than I already have.

The technical support is remarkable and very good.

We have a policy of server renewal every three to five years, so we changed all of blade servers to Synergy.

We, as a company, need to know more about the solution, because I know there is a lot of software included that we are not using. I would like the solution to provide training, so we could be more knowledgeable about what is included.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was pretty easy to start up and use it.

We used a Mexican integrator/reseller for the deployment, who was very good. They are one of my best suppliers.

The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent.

Top of the list was HPE. I didn't consider any other vendors.

The solution is pretty good and very stable. It has a great support. It works as the brochure says, "It works perfectly." 

We need to learn about the all the solutions that integrate well with Synergy. E.g., it has a monitoring solution that we need to explore.

We also use Hyper-V. So, we are already using physical servers to run it.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization.

It is a continuation of converged infrastructure. That is why we are interested in it.

The solution has reduced our infrastructure costs compared to the c7000 platform.

The most valuable feature of this solution is convergence.

OneView is head and shoulders above the competition in this space, though I would like to see some improvements to it.

I would like a longer amount of data for bandwidth utilization on Ethernet ports inside, as well as uplinks. The amount of data stored on them is way too small.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages.

For me, the scalability is how much money that I need to spend on switches for how many frames, which ultimately means servers. To get the best bandwidth before the most recent product announcement, I have buy new switches every three frames. The competition is shipping a product right now where I only need switches every ten frames.

it depends on what technical support you pay for, but the lowest echelon of HPE technical support is sadly uninformed, unknowledgeable, and dependent on wrote scripts. They won't answer a question without going through their script. It's not like you're actually talking to somebody who has any depth or time using any of the equipment.

They introduced Synergy, and we waited for a while. However, the reason for investing in Synergy isn't for normal business functions or functionality reasons. The main reason was that we knew that we wanted to buy servers that we wanted to keep for five years, and there isn't a big future in the c7000 platform.

Synergy is the same product in a different package.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We were direct through HPE.

Make sure you understand your own decision-making criteria and what is important to your company. Investigate all vendor options. Question your assumptions.

Get it into your lab and test it out before you make a sizeable financial commitment.

The things that I think are important HPE doesn't, and competitors do think they are important.

The primary use case would be our virtualization platforms, ranging from our presentation layers to just commodity workloads. 

I don't know that we're too much focused on hybrid cloud just yet, since we're a service provider. A lot of our clients are paying us to host their workloads. It's not like we're running our own IT and putting it in the cloud, as well. However, as we do move things there, these workloads are probably the ones that are most opportune to move to the public cloud. So, it would generate a hybrid scenario, as these are Citrix presentation systems, and also Windows and Linux VMs, which can move back and forth.

It has improved our procurement and day zero provisioning. We are bringing in racks of Synergy which are not populated with the blades, then we are buying the blades and populating them, as our business needs. This has been pretty helpful to be able to sort of pre-package the data center with the Synergy platform, then deploy servers into it as we grow.

The solution has driven us to use the OneView platform and have more alignment with HPE's strategic directions. We are still learning what that means to us, but at least it has put us in better alignment with where HPE is at. When we do find something that doesn't work, they are incentivized to fix it better than if we weren't aligned with their vision.

Synergy has actually challenged us to rethink how our IT infrastructure teams are structured. So, we're still dealing with that. Our hope is that by having OneView, Synergy, and software-defined that we will realize the value statement over time.

So far, the solution has helped us implement our new business requirements quickly. Synergy has the ability to have everything pre-packaged and being able to slide blades in. That is what we have always liked about blade architectures: We can slide a blade in, or if we need to move it, we can go move it somewhere else. There is less cabling to deal with, etc. It is one of the attractive things of the platform that we first got excited about it.

We bought in pretty early to the composability story and being able to software-define the compute. We are realizing a fair amount of that. 

It has been in the external integrations to other platforms that we have, which aren't HPE, where some of our challenges have been. We are still working on these.

I would like to see some integrations with non-HPE platforms. The Synergy platform is working pretty well in most cases. It does what it is advertised to do. Integrating it into our larger environment that is not HPE products has been somewhat of our challenge. I would challenge HPE to go fix and address these gaps. Have a story there, because not everybody will run HPE throughout their entire data center. I have other suppliers in there, and they have to work together.

What we are observing is to upgrade a whole rack of Synergy, so four frames when it's fully loaded, we are spending about 50 human hours doing that. There is a lot of work time and wait time in there. Overall, this work effort is spread across a bunch of people and the total time is about 50 hours. I don't know what percent increase that necessarily is, but it is a lot of work that we didn't do before. So, it feels like a big increase. That is still us rationalizing how the platform should be maintained.

I would like something that makes it even easier for developers to leverage OneView. It is all API driven. However, if you are using the web GUI that is OneView, you can't get any feedback about, "If I click this button, that button, or that button, before I hit go..." Show me what the API call is. Help me develop code faster if I am not a developer who wants to go read the whole API guide. Help me point, click, and start to develop code incrementally.

Stability-wise, it has been pretty good. When we are doing maintenance events. we have had some hiccups. We have definitely lost redundancy. There was one incident where we had everything go down. For the most part, what we are observing is the redundancy in the platform is working reasonably well. With the upgrades, we are just losing redundancy. 

We're not expecting it to go down. Our expectation is we will run our workload 100 percent of time, even while we're upgrading the platform. In some instances, that's happened, and in the ones that it hasn't, it is definitely a bug that the HPE team is trying to address.

We haven't hit the scale edge of it yet. However, we like what the solution says it will do. There have been some instances where we have overrun some of the software scaling, even without being at a massive hardware scale yet in the network space inside of Synergy. They are working on this, and it is something that we hope will continue.

We often find ourselves having to get into the Tier 2 and 3 support or into the development teams. Based on our scale, and what we do with this platform and others, we tend to find more bugs that are edge cases for most other people. Therefore, Tier 1 support is of little interest to us. However, when we have gotten to the right people, the technical support has been really good.

They stopped selling the old solution. We were using the c7000 blade infrastructure from HPE.

There were other things that we could have tried to do to wire up our environment differently. Having more simplistic cabling, being able to pre-stage frames, and slide servers is the experience that we desire to have. However, if it doesn't work with the other suppliers in my data center, then the experience quickly stops mattering.

Our environment is very complex. That had a fair amount of bearing on deploying this platform. The OneView tool promises to make things simpler. Sometimes, it overlooks some of the really edge cases of the configuration to make things simpler, and that's what we found. There would be another tool to go to behind the scenes to go do what we need to do or troubleshoot. So, we have challenged the HPE team: "OneView should be the one thing to go to. There should not be something else behind it, telling me to go login here, but rejecting me because I don't have that username and password, then making me call support to login." We don't like that.

We worked directly with HPE. Our experience with them was good. They came to the table and really worked with us. We generated a lot of bug tickets and issues, so we had a lot of really challenging conversations. However, the fact that they were there to have those conversations is why we wanted them.

HPE has brought people to bear for the project that would likely have come out of a Pointnext engagement in other cases. However, we haven't directly done something with Pointnext services.

We have definitely seen performance increases in the platform. A lot of that was related to just the componentry that is in it. We have sort of bought into the vision of where the platform is going to go and are hoping to see additional performance gains there. 

Synergy feels a little heavy still on the day to upgrade operations, etc. However, we have gained some efficiencies on the provisioning front-end side.

The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware.

it was pretty much the top three: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco, when we started looking at new compute. 

We decided to maintain our partnership with HPE because it's been around a long time. We know each other really well. We do a lot of business which is not server-related. They came to the table with their pricing models, investment strategies, and the partnership that they wanted to do to make their products fit better for us, which is why we chose to stick with them.

If you are deploying solutions that are well aligned with what HPE has designed this platform to do, then you will probably have pretty good success. If you are sort of weird, like us, and the things you do come off as strange, or whatever, there will be some things you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for. Therefore, you should really be partnering with HPE. You should be asking to talk to their development teams and getting feedback, such as, "Here's what we're seeing and here's how we're using it." Sometimes, as we've heard from the development teams, we've used features that they've created in ways they didn't imagine. We had some results that we didn't expect nor did they. So, that's what we're working on. If you think you will be in a similar situation, open that communication channel early and express that need to your account team.

Deployment time has decreased, for sure. What we have detected is we think the care and feeding maintenance over time might be a little higher than what we had expected. However, that is part of: 

• How are we going to structure the team? 
• How are we going to plan the work?
• How will the solution set get better?

I don't think our development team really knows of the solution or has any interactivity with it. Therefore, it hasn't necessarily enhanced nor has it detracted from a developer standpoint either.

In our environment, with what we are trying to achieve, it still has a ways to go.

The biggest lesson learned is that if you really buy into software-defined and start moving to infrastructure as code, there is a lot of power potential there, if you can just stay the course.