HPE Synergy Makes Good on All the Composable/Software Defined/Policy Based Infrastructure Hype!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
HPE Synergy solves our business problems for scaling and sizing various virtualized environments across the board via its composable infrastructure features. The logical encapsulation of all resources provides a set of rich functionality for policy based management, allocation/reallocation and utilization of resources.
Pros
- Nearly instant configuration of applications according to specific requirements within a single pool
- Deployment, updating and monitoring via a single interface
- Updates and redeployment with minimal service interruption
- Support for virtual, bare metal and containerized workloads
Cons
- Firmware repository size limitations could be larger (was increased recently but still is only room for a few SPPs)
- Profile template updates flag all machines that haven't had their profile updated from the template, causing the dashboard to go red with warnings and can cause unnecessary concern
- OneView, while powerful isn't as user friendly as it could be
Most Important Features
- Unified management
- Policy based administration (composable infrastructure)
- Firmware management
Return on Investment
- Eased concerns for go-live of a huge new deployment as we knew we could respond to any scaling concern swiftly and thoroughly
- Hardware has been rock solid since implementation
- Limits to initially deployed logical enclosure configurations have been addressed rapidly by the introduction of new hardware with fast speeds/additional management ring connectivity options
Alternatives Considered
Cisco UCS Series and Dell PowerEdge M
Other Software Used
VMware ESXi, VMware Aria Operations, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Progress MOVEit, HPE OneView, Hitachi Ops Center Protector, Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), Commvault HyperScale X, Redis™*, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Zerto, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software, ServiceNow Now Platform