HPE ProLiant DL is a rack server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
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Supermicro SuperBlade
Score 7.0 out of 10
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
