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.
We chose Dell PowerEdge R series because we need to consolidate a lot of physical load into a smaller number of nodes. Their hardware configuration, specifically for vSAN helps us achieve a high-density load in a very low number of physical servers. On top of that, they have lots of expansion ports, so we can increase our load internally on each other with simple upgrades.
Good price - Compared to other vendors’ server platforms. In our scenario (virtualization) we found out PowerEdge offers the best price/vCPU and RAM ratio.
Customizable - We were able to select optimal memory/disk capacity for our use case. Other platform's minimum requirements were above our needs, hence needlessly expensive.
Good warranty and service - Our project did not involve creating a big cluster with a lot of spare capacity, so the next business day warranty came handy.
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
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.
The Dell PowerEdge R range is just intuitive when you have skills engineers managing them in-house, although even with new members of staff on the team, the learning curve is very low providing they have previous general service hardware management experience. From the specification through to the management of this range, the usability is excellent.
We consider Dell's support to be best-in-class compared to other solutions and is also reasonably priced. Their SLA targets have almost always been met, except for minor occasions that have had extenuating circumstances. The service staff is also professional and thorough. Overall, we are very satisfied with the level of support we receive.
PowerEdge R servers was selected by CIO. I think the servers have lots of benefits for our company and are well placed on our projects. In most business cases they are working good and our management have a clear vision to upgrade them to the same brand with better specs. Hope to see this upgrade in close future.
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.
From the perspective of physical server consolidations, when servers spread across multiple branch and remote offices are gathered into a central data center, this simplification process provides ROI in several ways. One, the configuration control, restriction of server access.
Reduce complexity and enable greater standardization of hardware purchases, which lowers costs.
Increased security of the move are important.
The costs of moves, add-ins, and changes are reduced, as well as the costs of travel time and maintenance.
Migrating legacy operating systems to a newer version via rehosting brings similar ROI benefits when it comes to server consolidation.
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
