HPE BladeSystem is a brand of blade server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HPE blades include the ProLiant BL series and the ProLiant WS series.
N/A
Supermicro SuperBlade
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
SuperBlade is a high density x86 Multi-Node Server for Enterprise Cloud, HPC Applications, from Supermicro. They are available in 8U, 6U and 4U enclosures with hot-swap NVMe support, with air or direct liquid cooling.
HPE BladeSystem is functional for standard Windows and ESXi host usage. Although the design is over a decade old, its parts are up to current with today's processors and networks. BladeSystem is not suitable for applications that necessitate local storage, hyper-converged, or any other type of specialized PCI cards. Some of these use cases are better suited to the HPE Synergy platform, however that design is not without its own limitations.
Supermicro may be well suited if what you will be deploying on the servers is supported, because if you don't, you may have no support at all. In our case, we have had some hardware problems where the support is not efficient compared to other experiences we had (HP, DELL). On the other hand, their servers price is quite good, so it's a win win if you are looking for better prices than other vendors.
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.
My experience with the support was not that good, it always takes a lot of time to get somewhere when raising a support case. I gave it a 6 because I think they have room for improvement here, It could be good if they would act quicker and send in replacements for faulty hardware.
Incorporating HPE Blades Systems In order to house 16 physical servers, you just need 10 rack units instead of 32, which reduces the amount of heat produced and, in turn, the cost to cool the site. To have multiple Esx servers that can all be managed centrally, VMware virtualization is a must. HPE Blade Systems simplify the administration of several servers. You can develop pretty great projects with Onboard admin and Virtual connect. Virtualization is the best option.
The supermicro superblade servers are performing really well on our infrastructure, we are running a broad set of applications: voip, JAVA, linux, windows, hypervisors, etc. They are easy to install and configure and the price is a winning situation. On the other hand, The support is not so good, HP and DELL are stronger in this point. If you get any failures on your systems, they will replace them immediately, but supermicro will ask for a lot of information on the case before handing out replacement hardware, which makes it slow.
The number of ports required for connectivity to 16 physical server is reduced with BladeSystem, without compromising flexibility - so there is a 16x savings on the number of ports required on physical switching infrastructure.
In-place upgrades to newer hardware are accommodated by virtualized MAC addresses and WWN's in the fabric of the BladeSystem.
On a couple occasions, large scale outages have affected the environment because of an issue at the core of BladeSystem. Users should be aware of the fault domain caused by a single chassis and plan accordingly. Our issues were mitigated due to a second, separate chassis where we spread workloads.
