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.
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NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Score 9.4 out of 10
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NetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
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.
It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!
The GUI of Synergy is very user friendly and simple. Compared to previous generation products it has many great built in features. HPE Synergy shines in the management features of the OneView software making it a very good update from last gen. The ease of cabling and hardware replacement only add more to this.
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.
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.
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
