We had a POC on a Cisco UCS Blade system. We found that for our purposes, it required too much power. The particular system we had as POC required 4 x 30Amp circuits. We were going to use it to set up a VMWare ESXi cluster. In comparison, if we had used four HPE Proliant DL380 …
Better engineered and longer, more consistent production cycles. A G10 is a G10, even 3 years later. Many other brands make engineering changes constantly and the same model purchased a couple years apart use different drivers, different firmware, different parts. W can buy …
Cisco does not have a range of UCS equipment for small businesses at affordable costs, this is what makes it important and strong in these types of sectors or growing fields or small businesses. Additionally, the cheaper Cisco equipment does not compare in price with HPE …
HPE ProLiant DLs are nice servers. They provide good performance, have scalability potential, are very reliable, and fit our expectations. Service support is high quality. In most cases, I prefer to buy HPE servers again and keep them as long as possible because they provide …
Cisco UCS series is an enterprise-grade rack server offering from Cisco. It is a very reliable product and backed by Cisco's global support as well as a warranty. However, it is an expensive solution and not in the budget of many small to medium organizations. In these …
While Cisco and Dell make fine servers, the Compaq pedigree of HP ProLiant servers is in their DNA and one can see that by just opening one. The internal design is very well thought out and the modularity is unrivaled. While Dell may be cheaper for enterprise servers, one …
HPE ProLiant DL are very much reliable and performative products and support a large scale and variety of the workloads and environment from SMB to very large and mission critical environments. HPE ProLiant DL rack servers are very much energy efficient and performative for the …
In my personal opinion, Proliant DL is much better than comparable hardware from other manufacturers. Although the price tag might (or might not be higher) you get what you pay for. The couple times we decided to invest in comparable hardware from two other manufacturers, it …
The ML series is a bit more expensive and also larger, it does pack more power but the DL stands above in terms of performance and cost when comparing the two. The DL also has great storage capacities where the amount of desired bays can be installed and even at a later time.
I came from a Dell shop to an HPE shop. The PowerEdge series are good systems but I was never a fan of the iDRAC remote management component. I realize that this is subjective, but I also feel like firmware updates were more painful with Dell's servers. UEFI has leveled this …
These are complementary products, our HP servers running VMware connect to the Nimble SAN for storage and these work great together, it's like one big machine consisting of the VMware HP servers and the Nimble SAN (now owned by HPE). we run 10GB connections between these …
I formerly come from 100% Dell shops. I was thrust into an all HP environment and I was pleasantly surprised on how well the ProLiant brand solution stacks up to Dell PowerEdge. I think the HP solutions might scale better than Dell in a larger environment, but Dell has made in …
My organization was a relatively early adapter back in 2014. Nutanix was really the only other competitor we were aware of at the time. We felt the data management and integration features of SimpliVity were superior to Nutanix. Pricing was also very competitive from …
SimpliVity OmniCube supported NVidia Grid cards when we did our POC where Nutanix didn't.
SimpliVity also had a better business case for us as it gave us the DR planning that we wanted as well as a way to be innovating and reduce our space usage in the server room.
It is a robust and reliable machine and can be used in different scenarios. If you have a requirement for a high end physical server to host your organizations different online services then you can use ProLiant DL. It can also be used in an environment where there is a need to host multiple different virtual machines on two or more physical servers.
SimpliVity Omnicube is well suited in any environment. Especially if you are not currently using any VMware or Hyper-V products. It is a great gateway into the virtualization of your data center. For environments where VMware is currently being used, SimpliVity will be a great addition. Less cabling is required. Better performance is guaranteed. Two boxes are required as they work as a high availability pair. As the years go by you can simply just add a box or two to grow your environment. You can also get them configured with NVidia Grid cards to bring graphical performance to the VDI environment.
With upgrades to newer versions of VMware, HP has not provided VMware images with loaded drivers, this could be an issue for future upgrades to VMware users on HPs. The support forums discuss this and we wonder why no images are available.
Lilo support can be limited. These servers were preconfigured for us. HP was not able to help with this, telling us it must be in the preconfigured setup.
The base server did not meet our needs and the price ramped up quickly with add-ons to utilize SAN.
Usability is generally good. I mostly like to use the management interface on HPE servers. GUI is well placed and provides easy access to management and reporting. Firmware upgrade is usually smooth, drivers install correctly and provide good quality of service. We have enough ports and interfaces to connect to the servers and some room to upgrade.
It sits nicely ontop of VMWare and is easy enough to use. Some improvements to the UI could be done, such as placing buttons where it is expected to have them not in unusual places, so you have to hunt for them. The backup and restore is intuitive and makes things super easy if you need to do a quick rollback. Space savings on multiple VMs and backups means we are backing up more than we need which gives us confidence in what we do. Updating the system is also fairly easy and their support has always been fantastic. They will contact us if they detect any issues, usually before we notice them!
In over a decade, not once had we had a bad call with HPE support, not only were they have extremely qualified engineers but the speed in answering and addressing users is bar none. The same can not be said about support from other competitors in our experience over the years.
Support is very good. With proactive support, you are supported by an engineer in North America who answers the phone and immediately begins assisting with your issue. The folks I have dealt with in the last several years have been very skilled and it is rare to have a ticket open for more than a day or two. Issues affecting production are dealt with appropriately and are escalated within the support organization.
I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.
They last forever. We only replace them when newer versions of VMWare don't support our oldest models. Our refresh cycle on virtual hosts is 6 or 7 years.
Plenty of third-party service support available when the warranty is up. This helps extend the life cycle as well.
