We don't request technical support from the local HPE because we have in-house engineers.

HPE Apollo is a good product, but it has to improve its support to all the distributors and appoint value-added distributions.

Overall, I rate HPE Apollo a seven out of ten.

I would definitely recommend using this solution.Overall, I would rate HPE Apollo around eight to ten. It aligns with my high regard for HPE products.

Ideally, any work-intensive requirement platform for HPC and deep learning, and GPU-intensive platforms must use HPE Apollo. It is one of the best solutions we have at the moment for HPC and deep learning. I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I think the advice is to look at the workload very closely, understand what you want it to do, look at the product spectrum that's available here, and do the mix and match like we did. Build them together. There are software frameworks now that actually make it easier than when we did it, to stand up this sort of collection of resources, and to just go with what the workload needs.

Whilst looking for a vendor, we do not look at the brand name at all. Instead what we look for are just reliability and raw horsepower.

It has been great. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center guys have been great in supporting us very quickly and sometimes even at night or on weekends. I've been very fortunate as a professor to get this level of supercomputing, so we've been able to do the world's leading research in this area. The only things that I would improve are the ones that I have mentioned before, i.e., the Lustre file system, and maybe, the memory access from the CPU.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate HPE Apollo an eight out of ten.

If someone came with a similar storage need, the Apollo servers do make a lot of sense, especially when you're talking about scale out object storage-type implementations. That Apollo line, it makes perfect sense from my perspective and I would recommend that.

Our first batch of Apollo servers that we got were so new that it was just hard to know kind of what to expect from HPE and what they wanted to deliver to us. The first batch of servers that we got were missing an iLO and that may have been a confusion between what we ordered and we thought we ordered or what we thought we would've had. But anyways, that way it was resolved quickly and the iLo modules were shipped out and there was no problem there. But just because it was so new when we first got it that there was just some speed bumps when we first ordered them. Otherwise, they're a very solid server.

I can recommend this solution. It is easy to maintain. If you have an infrastructure team, you won't have any problem with it.

I would rate HPE Apollo a nine out of ten.

I rate HPE Apollo an eight out of ten.

Not many companies will have a similar type of requirements as we do. But if you need a low cost solution with a low footprint, then the Apollo 4200 is an ideal system for that.

From my end, I like that we get everything from HPE. So it's quite easy to point at HPE if something breaks. We have the switches from HPE, we have the storage from HPE, the service from HPE. So it's quite easy to get their help when something breaks, because they are responsible for all the parts in our datacenter.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. Unfortunately, I have been working with it for only two months, so I cannot give advice to others. However, the solution is good and can be improved by including automatic implementation in the next update.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is reliability. We need a vendor to be there for us, even when the product is already three or four years old. That's a big thing for us.

I give it an eight out of 10. It does what we expect it to do. As I said, cooling is still an issue, you really have to keep that in mind if you implement the solution. But aside from that, we're really happy with it.

Talk to a partner who has implemented a solution with HPE Apollo, talk to customers who have actually used it in the field. It's really simple to do.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria include

• overall trust in the company
• the financial side, of course, the price of the hardware 
• the quality of the support we can expect.

I rate it at eight out of 10. As I said, true independence between the nodes would be an improvement. At least make sure that the nodes aren't dependent on each other. Also, we've had a few difficulties integrating it at first, so I'll stay with an eight.

Test the solution and do a proof of concept until it works with your own integration procedures, the way you install systems, that kind of thing.

You should run the stable firmwares on a test platform for about a month before you roll them out. This is something we have to do that right now.

When choosing another vendor, we look at the overall product and then the software product on top of that. Switching to another vendor is always a big step. We normally don't do that because it presents issues. Every solution will migrate to the same functionality. There is not a great difference between various solutions, but only an incremental one.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include, of course, the experience of the technician, then the support. With HPE as I said, we have a strong relationship. So there is a priority channel for HPE versus other vendors. We always perform a PoC, we compare the vendors. But we were happy with HPE so we have no reason to change right now.

I rate it eight out of 10 right now. It will be a 10 when SimpliVity will be on top of it.

Great solution for object stores. Consolidation ratio on compute doesn’t make it a great alternative for virtualization hosts, but could be a decent hyperconverged platform. HP is utilizing SL technology for their CS-250 Hyperconverged appliance.