HPE ProLiant DL is a rack server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
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Lenovo ThinkSystem ST Series
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Lenovo now offers the ThinkSystem ST series of tower servers as a lower cost option for SMBs or light server workloads, available in the ST50, ST250, and ST550 editions.
ThinkSystem servers from Lenovo now replace the System x Series formerly by IBM and acquired by Lenovo in 2014, which reached end of life (EOL) in 2018.
It's well suited for a VMWare Esxi cluster setup. You are guaranteed to have the same CPU chipset to ensure the servers on the cluster are compatible with each other. We've had to stagger the purchase of systems by six months and have had compatibility issues. It's also well suited for I/O such as MS SQL or Oracle databases, Exchange servers, domain controllers. Pretty much any server setup will work with no issues on the HPE Proliant DL line. It's less appropriate as a NAS server, we had purchased one that ran on Windows Storage. Since it was more or less running Windows as a single controller, we had issues where it has locked up and caused an outage.
Lenovo ThinkSystem ST Series is a tower server series, so [you don't need] to stock [several] servers or make clusters just for the space they need. In this case, [it] is better to evaluate the SR series. For small business customers, it is perfect; it is a very silent server and is very upgradable, so the small business can grow with it.
iLO Advanced - I feel like this is just a money grab. Give me the remote features, at least the remote console, with the purchase. I'd be OK with paying for the advanced license for more centralized functionality, but straight remote sessions? That should just be there.
Software entitlements and online interaction are a little wanting. This isn't the hardware per se, but enterprise products are often heavily tied to online services and tools and that could be a lot better.
We have been using these servers for many years now and we have used different generations of this product line. We have never faced a catastrophic issue using these and even the smaller issues that we have faced have been dealt with by the technical support team of HP. They have been a reliable partner in our data center.
Overall, HPE support meets our requirements. They offer handy 24x7 phone support with clear case resolution interface. Engineers from HPE know their hardware and software. They are polite and help to find quick solutions for their customers. We don't need to prioritize our service requests to account managers to find how to fix or improve our service support.
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.
Well, the essential difference is the form of the server. Lenovo ThinkSystem ST Series is a tower server series.
We use it with business customers that don't have big racks. The server is usually located in dedicated cooled rooms, or.. in some situations, also in the office with the other pcs. We use this server series in professional studies or shops. We have sold only the SR50 and the SR250.
For bigger requests, we usually switch series, but we prefer the SR Series for rackmount.
Allowed us to move forward with running web-based applications and to scale them as needed.
The lack of future driver support has made it difficult to consider upgrades, we may need to go with more expensive hardware in the future to be able to maintain upgrades.
While we have not realized all the business growth benefits we expected from this investment, we have had much more flexibility and options when we need to change our environment to meet the business needs.
