HPE Apollo Reviews

We're using it for big data and storage servers. So mostly Hadoop for big data, Hadoop elastic search, and Ceph storage for our OpenStack private cloud.

The Apollo is performing fairly well. We've run into minor issues, but overall it does the job and we feel it's a good product for the money. 

It's allowed us to benefit from IP-based storage instead of using only fiber channel SAN storage. Also, I don't think we could have afforded that quantity of storage in a SAN array.

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. And 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.

There should be truly independent nodes for your rack, which can contain three different servers. I like to make sure when a component fails, I don't have to take down all three nodes. This is especially true as we usually have replication between these nodes. It would be a great asset to be able to contain the downtime to one of the nodes.

It's pretty stable. We've only had very minor issues with it. No major downtime. 

The only issues we've really run into so far is that there is a shared battery for all cache controllers in the node. When you have to replace that element, you have to take down all three nodes and not just one. That's something of a design flaw, but it's the only real issue we've had so far.

Yes, we've called tech support. Mostly for hardware faults.

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.

We are running Apollo with SL-series servers and the best thing about them is the density of the storage area available. Regarding TCO, total cost of ownership, per terabyte, they are now the best on the market.

Connectivity to the outside of the server needs to be improved at the same time the network is improving. This would give us more IO. Of course, this is a firmware lifecycle management issue; there is work to do. Vendors should test the firmware before they are delivered to customers.

Stability is good enough.

Scalability is fine because with this kind of service we can easily scale horizontally. We are more or less satisfied.

The technical support in Finland is fine.

We made a transformation from enterprise storage to an open-source distributed storage architecture. We switched because the pricing is better.

The initial setup was business as usual. It's not so complicated, but of course it takes time.

The price is not significantly lower than the competition, but it's lower than the standard price.

We looked at Dell and Super Micro. They are both on the market in Finland.

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.

It's a stable product; very reliable. It is a good basis upon which to build further. You see some evolution, but not too much. If you go to their events every year, you see an incremental evolution which is normal in that road.

I'm just a general manager and I’m not really technical. However, it gives you a nice, better flavor of the monitoring. I have heard that it provides better management and you can see the possibilities.

OpenView is a new product which does not support older versions of the hardware. This is an issue. That's why we cannot switch to the newer one. We continue using the older product, and that's working fine. I would like to see a bit more integration. This is the major topic.

It is stable and scalable, but the new product has some advantages which we like. However, we cannot switch because we have an issue between non-supported and supported devices.

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.

For us, the most valuable features are the price and density. We have very limited space and we're able to fit four servers into our data center's rack space. Although I think a lot of the servers from different vendors are going to be very similar because they all use Intel chips, making them essentially the same, it's the HP management software that makes it better than the competition.

The biggest benefit for us is a physical benefit in that we can save our very limited space. Again, it's a dense product, meaning we can fit several servers into our rack space.

The licensing could be greatly improved, I think. We have a very hard time tracking it because we have to get a license for every server and machine. We have to click in our email, then go to the site, then login to HP, then download the license, then we have to do it all again for each server and machine, and we have to know which server or machine the license is for and give the license to the installer. It's inefficient, overly complicated, and should be simpler and pain free.

We haven't had any issues with deploying it.

It's been stable so far, but we've only had it a few weeks.

We have six racks and we can fit another. At the moment, we have sixteen Apollo servers and we're going to put 40 in as we have the space for that.

We've signed up with a third-party management service. They've been really good so far.

The initial setup was simple for us. HP came in, they racked and stacked it, and the software guys came in. This took a day or two and they were all done with the image. The whole process including hardware and software stack took about two weeks.

We use the Apollo system for most of our branch offices. Our roadmap is to implement Apollo in all our branch offices by the end of 2018. So we will have something like 50 branch offices with Apollo.

We performed a PoC. We were very happy with it, so we decided to implement it in all the branches.

It's a compact system. We usually use three blades for two-rack units, and with enough storage, it's really a small system with a powerful CPU, powerful hard drives, powerful disks. So it provides enough performance in terms storage value. And the internal network, we are also very happy with it. So, for the branches for us, it's perfect.

The benefit is, as I said, we are compressing everything. In the past, we used StorageWorks P2000, plus SAN switches, plus three or four servers and so on. Now, we have two-rack units for everything. 

For a branch it's perfect because it's simplifying our life.

We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo.

Touch wood, it's perfect until now. Nothing to complain about.

We are not using it in that manner. We are not using it for the scalability. So the size, one Apollo for each branch, is perfect for us. We are not thinking about scalability.

As usual, with HPE, we are very happy with the support. Honestly, we used it only once for the Apollo system, but all our kits are HPE. So we use their support often and we haven't noticed any difference between Apollo versus C7000 or DL servers. So it's in line with the standard HPE support and we are happy with that.

We have a strong relationship with HPE. So HPE was proactive in proposing this solution. We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it. It satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution.

It was straightforward.

We always have an HPE engineer on our site, close to us. But usually, we prefer to do this kind of setup, at least the first time, to put our hands on the device itself, by ourselves. So the setup was done 95% without the support of this engineer. And maybe 5% for optimization with the support of this guy.

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.

It gives us the density of a blade without the issue of shared IO, and a good price point for object storage.

It's allowed us to compete with cloud storage providers like AWS to put together a scalable on-premises solution of more than 20PB at a similar pricepoint.

Direct integration with software (Cleversafe, Scality, Ceph) for a purpose-built object store appliance. Stay closer to the current rev of processors. I know it is a heating/cooling issue, but being a couple of revs back is problematic when comparing consolidation of workloads with standard intenl servers running the latest chips.

We have implemented this for a few client over the past three years.

Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable. HP has done a better job of regression testing against software (hypervisors and big data platforms specifically) in the recent generations.

It's got better in the past year and in line with other major manufacturers (Cisco, EMC).

Standard Proliant servers (DL380s) with internal storage. We also looked at SAN and NAS solutions, as well as VSAN technologies from VMware, HP, and Citrix. None could hit the pricepoint to compete with AWS S3.

Standard server technology. Some initial issues with flashing FW, but the rest was straightforward.

We were the vendor.

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.