HPE BladeSystem is a brand of blade server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HPE blades include the ProLiant BL series and the ProLiant WS series.
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HPE Synergy
Score 10.0 out of 10
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HPE Synergy is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software designed to support a composable infrastructure, which treats IT resources as a service that can be "composed" and deployed out to applications in near real-time, eliminating the need to configure hardware.
All nodes can be managed centrally through the ILO interface. Users and services alike benefit from the lightning-fast response time. Enable service continuity during VM migration between nodes. The purchase of a blade system is something we endorse as a viable alternative for your business. In order for the convergent system to work, the architecture can be adapted to accommodate new devices, and by applying new modules, both the technology and the system's responsiveness to demands for high availability can be enhanced.
The small form factor of a blade server cannot accommodate expansion cards.
Shared infrastructure, like the interconnects, means a larger fault domain.
Firmware updates can be disruptive and administrators should pay close attention to firmware recipes and bundles to ensure compatibility between components.
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
We do not intend to make new investments in HPE BladeSystem as it is in the end-of-life phase and we have continued with the new HPE Synergy environment. It is therefore not a process of discarding, but of evolution. This environment will possibly continue to be used in the institution, but for less critical purposes and more related to the development of new solutions.
The hardware has fulfilled all of the promises that it made when we first acquired it. The only thing that would preclude this would be if the organization decided to holistically switch hardware vendors for reasons other than performance and feature sets.
It's been said that BladeSystem is very similar to the UCS B-Series. While the network fabric features of the UCS B-Series outshine those of the BladeSystem, HPE has created extensive orchestration within HPE OneView to provide feature parity with and even surpass those of the UCS B-Series. The fundamental distinction between the two is whether the focus is on the computing (BladeSystem) or the fabric (UCS). In contrast to UCS's tight fabric integration, BladeSystem's centralized focus on servers simplifies administration.
While all similar offerings can achieve basically the same thing, HPE Synergy stands out against Cisco and Dell offerings with respect to manageability, ease of use and flexibility - HPE Synergy offers configurations groups of chassis to create logical enclosures that can be managed as a single entity and also blades in any slot can be plumbed and allocated as necessary to multiple uplinks. This is one level more flexible than the others which limits configurations of blades in a single chassis to similar uplink settings. Also, the HPE Synergy chassis itself supports 12 blades vs 10 in competitive offerings.
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
