We performed a comparison between HPE Apollo and HPE Synergy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and others in Density Optimized Servers."It's very reliable. I haven't had a single failure at all in the year and a half; not the slightest problem with it."
"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."
"It's pretty flexible. You can choose how much storage you put on the server. You can have one to three nodes, depending on whether you want more CPU or storage."
"It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems"
"we can use the same platform for several use cases: Hadoop, Ceph, and we are considering the server for another use case right now. It's a single solution, we only have to integrate it once and we can use it for several technologies."
"The solution is well documented in a data sheet."
"Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing."
"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"
"The price is reasonable, and the stability and scalability are okay. We bought the solution because it suits our needs."
"In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity... We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with it."
"The scalability is very good. The ability to link chassis or frames together makes it simplistic, especially with the use of OneView."
"It is helping us sort of bridge a gap that we are having moving off of old legacy systems, like HP-UX systems and trying to move over to x86. So, it is helping fill a hardware gap that a lot of our platforms have needed in the past."
"Orchestrating automations is great because you can connect to other tools with the REST API and automate components."
"The Online firmware update for the virtual connects has minimized our downtime windows."
"It's more composable, you can use storage as well as compute blades. So maybe it's more versatile compared to the traditional blade systems."
"The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity."
"I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second -that would be outstanding."
"The support from HPE Apollo could be better, they are making knowledgeable."
"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."
"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."
"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."
"We have tried to used standardization using Ubuntu Linux and it's been hard. They had some difficulties getting the RAID configuration up and running because there are no drivers for it. It's not supported by HPE."
"If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo."
"The predictive analysis feature could be improved."
"They must improve the OneView tools."
"One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput."
"The update is problematic. When you want to update the firmware, or when you want to update software on Composer, it takes a lot of time. A lot."
"I would really like a way to validate the firmware in my specific environment before trying to deploy it. Those were the issues we had early on with firmware upgrades, particularly around certificates. All in all, having some level of confidence aside from it just having been tested generically would help. Something more specific to my environment would be very helpful."
"The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up. We had some requirements from our information security department, and technical support wasn't able to give me immediate answers. They had to engage engineering, which they did, then they got me the answers. However, it took a week of back and forth conversations and phone calls to get it all worked out."
"In the past, I have had issues with configurations."
"The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient."
"It would be nice if the updates were not accompanied by downtime."
HPE Apollo is ranked 2nd in Density Optimized Servers with 22 reviews while HPE Synergy is ranked 1st in Blade Servers with 85 reviews. HPE Apollo is rated 8.4, while HPE Synergy is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE Apollo writes "An affordable and easy-to-implement solution, but its after-sales support and technical support should be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Synergy writes "Local hard drives are not needed for the i3S module that boots to any operating system". HPE Apollo is most compared with HPE ProLiant DL Servers, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, Dell PowerEdge FX, Dell PowerEdge XE Servers and IBM Power Systems, whereas HPE Synergy is most compared with HPE BladeSystem, Dell PowerEdge M, Cisco UCS B-Series, HPE ProLiant DL Servers and HPE Superdome X.
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