HPE Synergy Reviews

We use it for ESXi installations. It is for private clouds with application servers.

It helps us manage our IT landscape because it is easy, standard, and very consolidated. You don't need to have the storage and communications apart, because it's all consolidated.

The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity.

The solution has affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams by being easy to install.

It is very standard and easy to install.

I am rating this solution an eight (out of ten) because it is really good. However, you can always improve some things.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

The scalability is very good.

We haven't used the technical support, as we haven't had any problems.

We were using the c7000 blade system. We switched because we wanted to test something new. Also, it was announced that there would be other sales.

We have a capacity plan that we do every year. When we estimated what we needed for the current year, we decided that we wanted to invest in Synergy.

The initial setup was very easy.

We used an integrator for the deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

It has kept our cost of operations stable.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to.

We evaluated HPE and Dell EMC.

It is a good solution. We are happy with it. You should try it out.

The development team is very happy with the performance.

Biggest lesson learnt: Try new things, even if it wasn't your first choice. Always look for new things, and if they're good, then you should change.

Our primary use case is data center and tech refresh/cloud.

This product is basically a step in our transformation to be more hybrid.

We are still in the transformational phase, but the benefit will definitely be the infrastructure of code components.

It does help us to manage our IT landscape with the ease of deployment through OneView.

The solution affected the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team with the infrastructure as code and the ease and agility to deploy.

The most valuable feature is its compatibility.

The solution has decreased our deployment time.

Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more. However, it is still a great deployment methodology overall.

In my experience, HPE has always been highly available and highly reliable. I would expect Synergy to be nothing less.

The scalability is very good. The ability to link chassis or frames together makes it simplistic, especially with the use of OneView.

I haven't had to work with technical support yet, so the product was built well.

We were using traditional HPE c7000 chassis. We needed something a bit more modernized to enable the company's transformation.

The initial setup is straightforward. The infrastructures as code enables you to fill out the configuration before you even deploy it, then it is just a one-touch deployment.

I just switched companies. My old company did not use Pointnext services. This new company does use Pointnext services, and it's a lot easier to get the hardware on demand. You don't have to worry about making those hard upfront capitol purchases.

We used ConRes for the deployment, and my experience with them has always been great.

The solution has reduced our cost of operations by at least 15 to 20 percent.

The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by at least 30 percent, mainly because of the density compared to our former infrastructure.

We were looking at Nutanix, as well as the HPE Synergy. The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy. Overall, we are pleased with Synergy.

Take a serious look at Synergy.

The development team hasn't been brought into it.

The primary use case is virtual machines. We run VMware on them and virtual servers, so applications, web servers, and things of that nature.

The solution enables us to run VDI, backups, and web platforms for our organization in a hybrid cloud environment.

It makes life easier for us when we are deploying new technology, as we have the building blocks already in place.

It will put everything all under one umbrella, when we get to the point where the majority of our systems are all on Synergy. At this point, we are only 16 or 18 frames in. However, once we get everything onto the Synergy platform, they will all be manageable under one umbrella, and it will all be standard infrastructure.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. This is primarily from the standpoint of being able to deploy new servers and machines. As requests come in, we can turn them around within a matter of a day or two because we already have the building blocks in place.

We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two.

It would be nice if the OneView umbrella could truly be one view and cover everything. Synergy has its own version of OneView. ProLiant Servers have their own version of OneView, so it truly isn't one view. We also have other platforms within HPE that aren't covered by OneView at all. We have many views instead of one view, and it would be nice if that could be resolved. That would help us a lot.

The timeliness of updates, firmware, and things of that nature needs improvement, as far as what we have to apply, and when, being able to maintain a consistent load on each one of our frames.

The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back.

We still have some questions regarding the stability of the platform.

The scalability is very good.

From a technical support standpoint, it seems as though the platform came out more quickly than the technical support behind it did. It is much easier to find good tech support people from HPE on the older product line as opposed to Synergy. Synergy is a bit more limited.

We came from a blade environment. Now, we are on Synergy. It is a continuation of a product line that we have been using for well over a decade, and it is just familiar territory.

We were already heavily into c7000 blades. Synergy is a continuation from c7000s. From our standpoint, at least from the server standpoint, the functions are basically the same. 

The c7000 blade is retiring. Synergy is the next iteration of blade servers. Synergy is the next rendition of this type of platform, and it felt like a logical fit for us to move in this direction.

We are able to deploy much more quickly than if we were running physical equipment or rack servers.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. It was just the basics that we would have expected in using a product that we were already familiar with in OneView.

We did use HPE’s Pointnext services, and our experience was okay.

We used both a reseller and HPE for our deployment. 

If I look back at the days when we were deploying physical equipment or just rack mount equipment, as needed, the product has saved us weeks.

It's a relatively new investment. If anything, it has increased our costs at this point.

We have a long standing relationship with HPE, between the technology, pricing, and so on. It was a good fit.

The HPE Synergy is a good platform, but they need to look at management and updates to make sure that they know what they are getting into.

HPE continues to make a good product. There is no doubt about that. It is a possibility that we could have jumped into this a little too early. It would have been nicer if it where a more mature product when we jumped in. Sometimes waiting a bit can be beneficial.

We use it as a VMware host. We're a highly virtualized environment, so we run several VMs per blade.

With the new purchase, we've been able to upgrade our VMware from 5.5 to 6.7 to the newest version for hardware compatibility.

As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets.

The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly. We build customer in a box solutions that we ship out to casinos to manage their environments. This gives us added flexibility for building those out for customers.

The solution will affect the productivity of our development team shortly, as we have just purchased two of them for our development team to replace aging hardware. They will in production the next month and be on the same hardware. This will be a benefit for the development team to be able to develop in development on the same product, as we flip over to production.

The configurability of the cabinet is its most valuable feature.

Manageability is a lot less of a headache with OneView. The OneView profile pushing profiles out to hosts is pretty easy. It has decreased our deployment time by 50 percent.

I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources.

It has been very stable. We have no issues with the ones that we have in production.

That is something that we'll be able to test more as we put more in. However, we are definitely looking forward to managing multiple chassis in one environment.

We've had very good support. The initial setup was probably where we engaged with the most with tech support, and not a whole lot since then.

Our previous solution is just an older HPE chassis. We have multiple brands in the data center, but mainly c7000.

We needed to upgrade our hardware to be compatible with newer versions of VMware. Since we are basically an HPE shop, it was either newer blades for the c7000 chassis or a Synergy chassis. The Synergy chassis is the move of the future, which is what mainly influenced the purchase decision.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did run into a little issue with the depth of the box, so we had to order a deeper rack. That just delayed it a bit. However, we could have avoided this ahead of time if we knew that it was a bigger than a standard chassis.

We used an integrator for the deployment. They were very good. They were able to get us in contact quickly with the right people when we had questions.

Our maintenance and production times have been cut in half over our previous solutions. We don't have a lot of bodies, so saving engineer time is a valuable resource.

We don't have to spend as much time managing it, so there is a savings of 50 percent over our older existing solutions.

The biggest cost is the VMware licensing. 

In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000.

It was pretty much between Dell EMC and HPE. We are an HPE shop, and the Synergy chassis and the Dell EMC offering were pretty similar, so there was no real reason to change.

It is worth a good hard look. I like the options which are available for the different slots, as opposed to just straight blades. It provides a lot of flexibility, and if that's what you're looking for, then you will definitely like it.

We really haven't had any issues, other than size. Everybody has been going that way anyhow, so that is nothing bad. It's been a powerful system and reliable, so far.

Account for the size and make sure that you have the proper space in the rack, then everything else will be fine.

The solution has affected our TCO by saving us in man-hours. As far as physical licensing, power, heat, and cooling, it is all pretty much the same.

We are going to use it for the SQL server and hypervisors, thus for virtualization. From our point of view, it is the compute power that we are really looking to use. So, expanding on what we have been doing with the C7000 series, and moving it into Synergy.

We are just in the process of building it out. We have not had a chance to review what it will do for us in terms of what we currently have.

We are hoping rather than having to do manual tasks. We can redeploy resources to do other tasks. Automation saves us time and effort when doing these mundane tasks.

The composable infrastructure, so being able to build our own server profiles, then build up the infrastructure that we need from compute modules. Just automating all the management tasks that we have for our server hardware.

It is hard to say because we have not fully implemented it yet.

One of the issues that we that we have been having is with the firmware baselining. So, we need to just making sure that we get that working. However, we are in the early stages. It may well be that we just tweak a few things, then it does everything for us.

It seems to be really stable. We did blow one hardware model, but I think that was just a build issue. Other than that, it has been very stable.

On the scalability, it looks like it is right there for us, which is really good.

I have not used technical support yet.

We previously used the C7000 blade infrastructure, but that was kind of one enclosure with servers, and they were able to scale using multiple frames, multiple frame groups, etc. 

So, we were starting to outgrow our C7000 series. We started to grow our SAN network, therefore we had gone from 8G to 32G. Thus, our virtualization stage was growing, so we needed capacity. With the Synergy environment, we can just scale out. That is what we could not really do with the C7000 series.

Our reseller installed it; a third-party.

No. We are an HPE outfit, so everything is HPE.

Understand your needs, understand where you are going, and what your future and the future of the industry are. Make sure you invest and research into all the products that are available.

Synergy is first in class for composable infrastructure. It has the scalability that meets our future needs and the automation that builds into something that we are really looking forward to using.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Support, reliability, stability and the feature technologies which are included in the product.

Primary use is data storage.

Performance is about a seven out of 10.

It hasn't improved things.

We've been experimenting with shared storage.

We just started. Because we're using 2012, we're having issues making templates and such.

We're having issues with the install process, and integrating our installation with the new technology.

We haven't had issues with stability because we're using 2012.

We haven't had to scale yet.

They're okay, but they could improve. We have their technicians on site, and we think they need some more experience.

We were using standard C7000. It was working fine, but it doesn't have shared storage.

Straightforward.

Cisco. 

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• quick support
• reliability, of course.

I rate this solution a seven out of 10 because I think we were promised a little more than we were given. It's true, they are working very hard to try to help.

If you're planning on going with Windows 2016, go ahead, use it. But expect to have some difficulties.

My primary use case was to familiarize myself with this new HPE product because I know it is a replacement for the old C7000 chassis, so for me it was interesting to see the new features, to know the product as a whole.

Everything is combined in one chassis, you have storage, compute, networking. So you save a lot of space in the datacenter.

The most valuable is the OneView interface. You can do all the management steps you need to do to configure it, and you can see everything for management, for error reporting, monitoring, etc.

I don't know because this was the first time I've seen this product and I'm not very familiar with it. I need some time to work on it, to play with it.

I cannot say. I would need to test it in a proper environment.

From what I've tested, it looks scalable.

We are very pleased with the support of HPE.

We used other HPE products.

It was easy to follow the guides. It was straightforward.

The most important criteria for me, when selecting a vendor, is support.

I would tell others to give it a try.

Primary use case is for Oracle Servers to store a large database.

Right now the performance is good, but we have only had the solution installed in production for two months.

First of all, it's new hardware. So everybody noticed very large improvement in data processing. A lot of activity which took hours now takes, let's say, tens of minutes. So it's a very visible improvement in quality.

I think the ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

When templates are created, there are some steps where you need to reboot the machines. Being in production, this is not a good idea. For example, if you reconfigure the network, you should not have to reboot the machine. You should just apply the new template and that's it.

Right now, it's stable. But we have only had it for five months, three months in proof of concept and two months in production. But we haven't have any issues up until now.

No issues.

We haven't had to call them. HPE installed it, that was about it. We have been able to manage it very easily since.

We had some old generation servers, we needed to replace them. This was the newest technology, so we went with the newest technology.

Also, we have been working with HPE for a long, long time. So we just stuck with what we know.

I think we needed HPE only for the hardware install. After that, I don't think we really needed them.

I give it an eight out of 10, because of the rebooting issue I mentioned above.

It's worth acquiring this if you have a larger datacenter, or if you have a lot of operations being done on a daily basis. These are the main reasons why you should take this approach.