HPE BladeSystem: Used for Almost 10 Years
March 14, 2021
HPE BladeSystem: Used for Almost 10 Years
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HPE BladeSystem
HPE BladeSystem is being used as our primary server platform for all production services in our organization. It has been employed since Gen1 and has been used for its ability to virtualize what used to be very manual cabling, networking, and server management. Blades come in a variety of configurations and capabilities to fit the business need. We're using BL360s in a c7000 chassis with FlexFabric 10Gbps ports for Ethernet and SAN. This is a basic configuration that allows us to run a dense VM environment with minimal external cabling and networking and complete remote management.
- Variety of server configurations
- Complete remotely managed server hardware, networking, connectivity, and monitoring.
- Repeatable configurations
- Configuration methods: Only Web GUI and SSH command line.
- Virtual Connect web GUI still uses flash :(
- Bay-to-server-to-card hardware "mapping" is kind of confusing at first.
- Less hardware management (racking, cabling, etc.).
- Less hardware (cabling, ports, switches, etc.)
- Remote server management (power on, networking, configuring, etc.)
We tested Cisco UCS in its early days, so this might be a bit of an old comparison, but UCS had the promise of being very configurable, with templates for everything and automatable for just about every task. However, even working with a Cisco engineer for weeks, we could not get a basic setup to work for us. Although there is a small learning curve with HPE BladeSystem, it has served us faithfully for almost 10 years.
Do you think HPE BladeSystem delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with HPE BladeSystem's feature set?
Yes
Did HPE BladeSystem live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of HPE BladeSystem go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy HPE BladeSystem again?
Yes