We used VMware, but it couldn't give us information about infrastructure issues compared to HPE OneView.

The previous solution we used was Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager but we had to change because of the automation that is available in the new solution to help with implementation.

We needed to invest in a new solution, so it came out and it was the next step for us. It was far better than what we had. It would improve a lot of the issues that were lacking in the older model of Virtual Connect Manager.

Our company was contracted to work solely with the solution and develop multiple servers. We even worked at HPE's headquarters in Texas. We tested any new products, servers, configurations, or architecture with VMware before releasing it into the market. 

I was tired of Insight Manager and Virtual Connect Manager and their limitations.

Previously, we used a different solution. It wasn't single console management. Using physical, multiple servers and engineers is very complex from the customer's end.

I want to use the management platform for the entire infrastructure. I don't think you could really do anything without one unless you're into manual labor and you have a team of cheap people to do the work. But that doesn't really scale well. Automation is really where it's at.

OneView is an absolute requirement. Synergy has the appliance built into the box now. It's a critical component, so there's no getting around it. You need OneView.

We used HPE Systems Insight Manager previously, but nothing that could provision the way OneView works. There was Virtual Connect before OneView if you wanted to manage each individually as its own domain and get profiles that way. But, again, that doesn't scale. You can't have hundreds of closures and manage each one individually. You need something that can do it all in one place.

The number one question when looking for a vendor is, “does it meet the requirements?" If you go beyond meeting your requirements, then it's about service. It's about price. Issues like that.

We used the older versions of HPE IC and SIM. Those required two interfaces and you also had to go through your OA. There were a lot of different steps to it. Teaching somebody new was always a little more difficult. Now you teach them with HP OneView, and they can automatically click on the server or the profile and go right down to the actual physical blades, and see what chassis it is in and where it is located.

When selecting a vendor, we like that we use HPE for everything except for storage. We've used them from large systems, to blades, to racks, and to clusters. We've used them for a lot of things. I think just the fact that they have such a broad portfolio of products was part of our decision.

With 3.1 coming out, it will have all of the features I was looking for. When that comes out in July, then I think we will have everything that we're looking for. I think they are ahead of the curve on what works.

It is a pretty good product. I like the fact that it's a single pane of glass. I don't like having the old environment, which had HP IC and SIM and all those other components. It always took a long time to get to the OA. Now you have one view of everything: your applications and your servers. You an easily pull reports, so there is definitely an advantage in using it.

We knew that we needed to go to OneView when we started investing in the BladeSystem infrastructure. That's the best way to go when you're doing anything BladeSystem related.

We didn’t have any previous solutions. It was just a correct step for us to take at the time. It was the next viable solution that we wanted in that space.

We are also using Dell and Cisco UCS. Dell's technical support is better than HPE. In terms of hardware, stability, and other things, there are no issues.

We bought Synergy because we were doing a Greenfield and we knew that the writing was on the wall as far as what the future was going to be in terms of Synergy versus C-1000. The choice was to not invest in the older technology, but rather to invest in the newer technology to future-proof ourselves. 

That dictated that we needed a solution. As to why did we chose one or the other, that was basically future proofing. 

It is a little scary to be the "data customer". We're one of the first 50 customers right now to purchase it. Composer is one unit in Synergy, but it's a physical appliance. We also have to other appliances to manage all the old legacy stuff: C-7000, 580s, 380s, anything else you'd want. So we have both of those. It wasn't a choice of one or the other. You have to have this for this and you have to have that for that. 

That single band of class that is kind of the manager of the managers. It really saves a lot of time. One of the main reasons we didn't use OneView sooner with our older environment was one of the initial caveats. Once you brought a box, or you brought a C-7000 chassis into the OneView management purview, it basically took over and did a whole bunch of stuff. You have to plan it out because it took over and you would have to reconfigure things.

Instead of just taking it in, and leaving things in a view-only mode, so I still can see it. Maybe at least I could view it in a single pane glass so I could see where things are at. That was kind of why that supposedly had been fixed. You can now bring things in without outages, but I don't trust it. I will delay the evacuation of a chassis to the time when we bring that in.

We knew we needed to invest just because of the fragmentation issue. We noticed that every time there was an incident or occurrence, it was firmware related. Generally, when you open an incident ticket with any hardware vendor, that's usually the first question, as well as any of the stability issues behind it.

We wanted to make sure that we could rule that out on a currency, on a release schedule, so we could say, "Yep. Because the servers are having scope, we're going to release it on this schedule. Once a year, twice a year, whatever it is." We didn't have a platform existing at that time to do that for us, and that's when we looked at OneView.

We were just using the predecessor of the software, HPE SIM.

We have a significant number of enclosures that we had to add, so we just knew that we needed to move up to a different class of data center, so as to be able to mange things in one location.

Somebody who is stable, someone who has the personnel to answer the questions and someone who has great technical support are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor; HPE needs that to some extent. Like I have mentioned earlier, I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but overall, it's pretty good.

I've been using HP ever since I can remember. They were actually some of the first computers that we had in the military when they started going over to computers, and I've been using them ever since. I wasn't, but one of our developers pushed forward Dell and they kind of blew up. Their quotes were outrageous compared to what it was from HP.

We had to stop using the previous solution, because it was the old HPE SIEM product. It continuously crashed for us. We used it to monitor our storage and our service, and it did not work. So, we stopped using any product at all for about a year, then we heard about this one. I was talking to our Account Manager and said, "I need this one, because then I can actually see what is going on."

Of course, it is been a long journey for OneView 1.0, but now it is actually working and we can see all our servers, even the small ones that we have. We have offices of 2500 people, and offices with five people. So, we have small servers, microservers, actually. There is a difference from big to small, and we are actually able to see all of them. Maybe we cannot manage the small ones, but we can monitor them and the big ones. A great feature.

SIM does not really fit anymore. It was awesome for Gen 6 and previous, but when you go to Gen 7, 8, 9, and now Gen 10, there's so much new technology in there that you need a more complex silo or a more complex tool, like OneView. We are a full, 100% HPE shop, so it's just natural that we'd pick an excellent HPE software product to go with our excellent HPE hardware products.

When selecting a vendor, I look for good communication, excellent products, and friendly staff.

It's a particular tool to help us in managing our environment. So, it was something that we needed to have. Just something you know when you manage your environment that you have to have a tool like that. It's very good.

So, before that we just had C7000 enclosures and we were just logging into each OA and just doing profiles individually per enclosure. So, now with OneView we create the profiles, but then we have ten enclosures included into that system.

We can just move stuff where we want. We didn't have that capability before. We never linked our C7000s, so each C7000 had its own profiles and its own OA that we had to login.

I was using the previous solution, Insight Control and HPSim, so this is much better.

At the time, we were managing our HPE blade systems with Virtual Connect Manager and an on-board administrator. This was the normal HPE tool set that existed at the time.

When choosing a vendor, support is important. As a re-seller, when we take a product to market and sell it to costumers, we really need to be confident that we've been able to put it through its paces. We want to know about the testing and quality assurance ourselves. We don’t want to take the vendor's word for it.

Once we've decided to move forward with that partnership, it becomes important for us that we have a deep bench system behind us. If we run out of runway, we want to know that we've got a partner to resolve things for us.

Well, like I said, we've got multiple vendors. Actually I came from an IBM background initially, but also a Lenovo background and then I took on the HP architecture products, just because they knew I had a background in X86.

I used to have a consulting company using open source software for healthcare for small businesses. I wanted to ensure that security was paramount in my business. After I did a risk analysis for a company, I recommended that they move to a private cloud, which was a huge project for a small company like theirs.

HP was their vendor, and they helped them move towards the solution they needed. OneView came out then, and so I checked out HP’s product line for my needs at the time as well.

Responsiveness is the most important factor while selecting a vendor.

I was using all the standard HPE tools that come as standard with the infrastructure itself, such as the built in Onboard Administrator, Virtual Connect Manager and Service pack for Proliant. The scale of the refresh we were doing and the time frame we were trying to do it in led us to OneView. It allowed us to merge all these seperate point management solutions into the one tool for managing and updating the hardware/firmware.

If you have a lot of devices, like we do, then you have to have one single pane of view, otherwise we lose too much time. So, we needed this type of solution, and it is the only option HPE offers.

We decided we needed this solution when we came to HPE's event in 2016 London. 

We did not use a previous solution. We focus on HPE products.

We always sell OneView to our customers, but they use other management tools.
For us, choosing a vendor is about the scale of the solution, how stable it is and how easy it is for a customer to move from one solution to the other.

Previously, we were just managing the blades directly through the HPE Onboard Administrator (OA) and Virtual Connect (VC). We were building up brand new data centers, with brand new equipment and we had the choice of doing it the old way, or using OneView; we could just have two places to see it, i.e., one on each data center. So, we decided to combine it, this was a suggestion by one of the partners.

Stability and support are the most important criteria while looking for a vendor.

Previously, we managed the servers manually.

Previously, we were using a different hardware vendor. The inconsistency of the drivers and firmware was one of the strongest reasons as to why we switched to HPE.

Actually, it was just that, at that time, we decided to invest in this solution. We were still using the HPE ConvergedSystem.

We have used HPE before, i.e., the old system. We have had HPE from G4-G9

We have stated to use HPE Blade systems C7000.

We have been using it four years, and also the previous version, HBC. 

We haven’t used anything else. We are an HPE shop, so we use their element manager.

Prior to this product, we used dashboards, i.e., a separate dashboard for each type of equipment. For example, one dashboard for switches, another one for the servers and one dashboard for storage. It was complicated. Now we have one login and one password for all; it is good.

I forgot the other product's name, we were using the previous version of one of the HPE tools. Once they were switching over to OneView, we decided to switch over to OneView, so that we'd get that one-pane-of-glass.

Reliability and support are the main two things that we look at while selecting a vendor.

We did not have a previous solution.

We needed a solution for a long time just to save time, because if you are doing 120 servers and having to go into each one, boot it up, wait for it to reboot, and change settings, then you might make mistakes if you are doing that many servers. So, just to have it all automated and being able to do it in one go, it is quite good. 

We always review other vendors, but I don't like to name names. I have used a number of solutions. I have been working in the industry since 97. I've actually worked all the way back with Compact. It is about ease of use and making sure the functionality is there, and then, less bugs.

Whenever you run into bugs, that kind of solution can really impact your environment.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability and stability. Without that, IT loses its face to the entire company and you have no credibility.

We chose HPE because of the holistic solution. A lot of people use the term "one throat to choke". They have really good servers, and we want to use their servers. They have really good blades, and we want to use their blades. We want to use their chassis for the density. The reliability is there. We are familiar with the iLO, and we are able to hire people who are familiar with their environment.

We did not use a different solution. I try to stick with a vendor with the hardware. When looking for a vendor, specifically for this product, it has to do with our activity and our hardware so we are able integrate our APIs with the system.

There was no other solution prior to this one. We felt that we needed OneView because it could do more in less time and in an easier way. We have accomplished that and there is no problem there.

Right now, it is difficult for me to answer this since we are very young with this integration. It is also a starting point to make decisions and to decide the future way.

We didn't have a solution previously. This was part of a larger product that we did for bringing in a three part storage, and migrating the new 3PAR and C7000 enclosures.

Actually our value-added reseller, Pricon, is the one who told us about OneView. Previously we were just using the C7 management console.

Previously, we were not using any other solution; it was just managing the virtual connecting individually. We really didn't have a choice in selecting a particular product as such, that was just the direction in which the organization was going.

We're partners, so we get to see the products, test them, and eventually, promote them. That's really how we work.

I am a vendor, so I get selected; but obviously, knowledge of a product, certifications, partnerships and their levels, etc. are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

We were not using any other solution prior to this one.

We did not have a previous solution. We found out about this solution through a partner. He brought it to us and said, "Hey, you know, this might be something you want to consider." When selecting vendors, they have to be stable. HPE is pretty good.

We were using HPE SIM. That's fairly buggy. It's okay for monitoring hardware, but it's a bit of a drama for other things.

Before OneView, we would just log on to the onboard administrator (OA) and the virtual connects (VCs) directly.

We did not have a different solution.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of the lifecycle. We used to work with HPE’s Insight. When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability.

We were using Insight Manager, which was the product before OneView's conception. Therefore, we heard about OneView, and started using it instead.

We are an HPE shop so we didn't look around much.

This tool was recommended to us by our partners. We then had it included with the service that we bought and implemented it.

Reliability is the most important criteria while selecting a vendor.