ProLiant DL Servers helped our business critical process to run without hiccups.

The cost and the user experience are two of the main benefits.

The benefit is that they're pretty reliable. Reliability is pretty much what we need.

It helped us a lot because it's a very stable solution.

It's not changing very much in terms of handling from generation to generation. So every time they introduce a new ProLiant generation, it's very easy for our operations team to adopt it; and it's very easy for us to adapt to the new features.

Because of the commonality between systems, we also have a very lean and optimized process for replacing people when resources need to be moved around. I think that's the main benefit of the ProLiant platform.

We make steel and the manufacturing also requires software. These servers are the ones that we prefer. Since the beginning, we were tied with HPE and I have an annual maintenance contract for all of my servers. I have around 3,000 computers, 800 are servers including Alphas, from HPE. I have very few Dell EMC servers. I don't prefer Dell EMC primarily because the availability of the service engineer is not like HPE. It's not weird that Dell or IBM servers are not as good as HPE. Because I have the facility, the advantage of HPE is that they have been here since the beginning and so I prefer HPE. Since it's distributed across India, a very large area of almost 30 other square kilometers, I cannot house every one of them in one common platform. All of my Oracle lower databases or HPE server databases and all of the software I've accepted all the Alphas and even I use Windows platform operating systems. These particular servers have served very well.

As a cloud service provider, we have to provide compute to customers with reliable hardware support.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

It reduces the amount of work that we have to do. In the old days we used to have to go downstairs and basically plug into a computer and do stuff like that. Now, we're at our desk and we just walk right up to a computer and if you know something is going on you can easily open the case with HP and have them come out and take a look at it.

The Gen8 and Gen9 hardware provides agentless monitoring and management using the iLO, so we don't have to run agents and rely on software to get hardware alerts. These all come across directly from the iLO. OS level alerts still require agents, but all the basic hardware monitoring does not.

The layout is quite nice as, for the most part, you don't have to tear the machine half apart to get to a piece. So, sometimes when they have on-site technicians to replace a part, we don't have to send a senior technician out there to do it. They can pretty much easily find it and get the parts swapped.

Parts fail, that's part of the IT business, but the ability to be able to get in there quickly and get parts swapped is a very big benefit.

Stability and reliability. It's rare that it fails and, when it does, we have HPE support, with a four hour turnaround. It gets fixed.

For us, we use the DLs more on a piece by piece basis, so when our clients come to us with a very specific demand that really doesn't fit well with our blades, which is our preference, then we go to the DLs, and then we scale it out for whatever they need.

It's more of a rack server, it's more of a commodity kind of device. I know what I'm buying when I buy from HPE. I get that reliable server, good service, good support, and it works.

We're able to provide greater support services outside of normal business hours, as well as at sites where we don't have service groups.

We've been using them for several years, and because we've been using them throughout our data centers, they've been uniform. All of our techs are familiar with them, and I think it's just familiarity with the servers which has benefited us a lot.

We've reduced the number of physical servers, currently. So, we've brought it down from 38 servers down to about 15. Seeing that we are standardizing, it's easier to support the devices, as we don't have that many different devices on-site that need to be supported.

We have been able to virtualize many physical servers into virtual servers running on a smaller number of physical hosts. This has allowed us to consolidate and reduce our carbon footprint in the data center and have a higher ROI on Capex purchases. Also becomes easier to introduce new hardware as part of replacement cycles as VMs are hardware independent.

We only have support staff in North America and in Europe, so it enables us to offer support globally in our other offices. If there's an issue in the Sydney office, we can log on remotely, needing very little work. The main benefit is less manpower, which means that if there's an issue at 3:00 in the morning in the US, I can do the work rather than having to get somebody else to do the work.

From my point of view, most of what we do with our servers is fairly common. So we could get the same solution elsewhere. It's about the manageability and the way that we are able to do it in the scope of the resources we have.

The business benefits - if we stick to one brand, you don't have to have as much people, as far as knowing different brands and stuff like that. 

Reliability - so we don't have to keep repairing them, we don't have downtime, which is key. Most of our plants are 24/7, so we've got to make sure that we don't have downtime. We used them in a Hyper-V environment, that adds in the uptime, as well.

I think it's just the generations that are built on the ProLiant line of servers.

It's just a computer server, so we just use them for whatever things we can't virtualize so it's nothing very special in that regard as far as what sets HPEs apart from somebody else's there.

We’ve got 30,000 lawyers connecting every day, and we needed to serve them in an efficient manner. This is done by managing their dockets well and automating the process in a streamlined manner. By allowing our lawyers to automate the process, we are able to better serve their needs.

This solution has improved how our organization functions because it enhances the service delivery, as part of the managed solution.

These servers have provided good scale and performance for our environment.

Our organization itself is in bit of a transition at the moment. So we're moving towards more up-to-date solutions for our infrastructure. Anything that we do to improve reliability and availability of our services is always good from an IT point of view.

The benefits are that we can customize what we want. We're able to tailor the actual service itself to our specific requirements. This is opposed to trying to get something off-the shelf which doesn't quite fit and then we have to make compromises.

On the SMP side, applying 380 servers, it can handle multiple applications and supports a virtual missions environment. It has a good memory, good power storage facility, a redundant power supply, drives, etc. It is a good product on the SMP side. 

The downtime on the systems is less frequent. If one machine is out of the cluster, we call HPE and tell them about any of the hardware defects that we have. They come up with the parts pretty quickly. The engineer who comes is really knowledgeable and knows what he or she is doing. The process is much faster.

These replaced old Dell servers and have half the footprint, being as they're a 2U server. They also used half the power. They saved us considerable amounts of money and hosting costs with our data center. Deploying these servers actually saves us money.

These products are used as corporate infrastructure servers and improve our ability to perform everyday tasks crucial to our business as well as allow for easy administration from an IT perspective.

Just that support is really easy to get a hold of and when things are not functioning, they are able to get the right parts within the right SLAs and it just happens.

It benefits our organization, operation-wise, because of its stability. Operation-wise, we don't have to put out as much and there's less maintenance.

What we are doing with the product is, we are building services on top of the HPE products, so the main advantage for us is that we have a stable, reliable platform.

We use the DL380 mainly for our workloads, so it's a combination of having to use local storage but also having high demands in terms of top speed on processors. We're using the highest top speed possible in a DL380. With that on the local discs, we get lots of performance where other systems will connect to a traditional SAN-based storage.

You would lose speed there, so we use the product for these high workloads, but we also use products like the 380 or the 360 for workloads that are actually offsite. These are like our smaller data centers where we don't have virtualization. These are branch offices or could be used as a domain controller for Windows, those sorts of workloads.

I have never implemented them as part of an organization, but I worked with these rack servers while providing support for customers.

During the period of time I was providing tech support for this product line, I was able to see that its fault tolerance is really high, providing the capability of a reaction against a “disaster” and the failure rate is really low.

It gave me more insight to our actual data usage on our disk arrays. Before that, we were using the P2000 G3 disk array from HPE MSA series; just not a whole lot of insights in that.

It’s more an Intel advantage. The fact that the Gen9 relies on the latest CPUs from Intel, it’s a very high density of processing power that serves our needs greatly.

We only have about 400 employees citywide but if they go down for a day, that angers our citizens so they have to be up all the time and I can't have down time. This gives me the ability to do that.

The organization is always hamstrung by the staff people they have available to run these systems. If you have a trained staff, you don't want to throw all this training overboard just to get a new server. You have an evolving but steadily moving ecosystem of how you get these things set up, connected, maintained and so on, so forth. That's probably even more valuable than just, "Hey, competitor A or B has 2% more efficiency or 2% more power to deliver".

Without VC, changes to server hardware (for example, replacing the system board during a service event) typically implies changes to the MAC addresses and WWNs. The server administrator must then contact the LAN/SAN administrators, give them the updated addresses, and wait for them to make the appropriate updates to their infrastructure. With VC, a server profile keeps the MAC addresses and WWNs constant, so the server administrator can apply the same networking profile to new hardware. Additionally, VC Flex-10 and VC Flex-20 technology further simplifies network interconnects. Flex-10/Flex-20 technology allows you to split a 10 Gb or 20 Gb Ethernet port into four physical function NICs (called FlexNICs). This feature lets you replace multiple lower-bandwidth NICs with a single 10 Gb or 20 Gb adapter. Prior to Flex-10, a typical server blade enclosure required up to 40 pieces of hardware (32 mezzanine adapters and eight modules) for a full enclosure of 16 virtualized servers. Using HP FlexNICs with Virtual Connect interconnect modules reduces the required hardware by up to 50 percent by consolidating all NIC connections onto two 10 Gb or 20 Gb ports.

The way that we have used the ProLiant platform within our business, being that it's such a widespread usage, it gives us the capability to develop in-house expertise with those systems, provide assistance to our 300+ divisions when they have issues with either their system or they need some sort of help internally. We have the capability and the knowledge to reach out to them from a global IT team.

For certain applications that we have to have for external connectivity it runs great. Our main security system has one of these little USB dongles that starts off the back end, I could make it on the blade, but then it'd block up one blade, so having a DL380 is great for us. It does everything we ever need.

It's been in for so long, it just works.

Not only are they reliable, but the management interface is also great for us. Also, HP's support team knows the drivers of our system, so we can rely on them. We're confident that HP will deliver the latest drivers for the DL series to allow us to run the latest Microsoft applications.

We run many apps on it, such as MS Exchange, test development systems, and SQL servers. For development, we run RHEL.

Ease of management and the low-cost ownership.

It has improved our organization in terms of providing more speed and reliability while being low maintenance. We're totally dependent upon it as we move forward.

The benefit is that it goes well with our customers. Customers are happy with that. We sell them, and that's how we make money.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

It's helpful to have standardized platforms, and so from that standpoint it works very well for our environment at our company because we have a vast distributed data center infrastructure across multiple locations so it helps to have standardized platforms to reduce operating expense and extend the lifecycle of the product. It would just be ease of maintainability and standardization to minimize.

Very simply, we needed a stable server, and this is a stable server.

Servers are all about reliability and the HP ProLiant is well priced. You can get other reliable servers, but you're going to pay much more. These are very well priced for what they are.

We're a very small IT group within the enterprise and we haven't got the money or the time to be spending tons of time configuring stuff out and messing around with it, fixing it when it breaks, and that kind of thing. It's a low-maintenance solution. Essentially, we don't have to do much of that with ProLiant, so it's absolutely a good fit for us.

For us, it is more of reliability even though we have hardware maintenance.

Generally, we'll do 10 calls a month globally. With our offices all over the globe, 10 calls in a month are very minimal since we have 600 pieces of DL hardware. It's quite small.

IT is easily manageable and expandable as well as usability for anything. especially for clustering using VMware vCenter server solution.

It saves us money.

It allows me to run a lot of virtual machines at the same time. It helps me do a lot of testing, so I can build a virtual machine and try things out on it. If it doesn't work, I can just recreate it.

Their modularity offers good local storage and connectivity options. We can expand the disk capacity, processor and memory based on our needs. The solution is easy to maintain.

We are using, in Israel, a company called Arrow to distribute, and they are very very good for shipping, packaging, in replacing the front panel. They work on HPE a lot. They are doing it very quickly, they distribute it very quickly.

The benefits are that it allows us deliver solutions to our software developers faster and the up-time is maintained.

It reduced costs and time.

Obviously, more performance from having the higher core counts and the additional memory.

We are on a journey with that. iLO, in particular, helps us manage the servers better, especially as a lot of them are remote from where the IT staff are. We have some locations where we just have not got IT presence at those locations, so iLO really helps with that. We are starting to use HPE OneView to manage them further, so that is where we are going with it. Hopefully, to go and be able to manage them.

It's easy to set up for the whole firm. Nobody has trouble with it.

It gives us the ability to manage centrally. If you have a problem with any of the servers, it will send alerts and you can easily find out where they are located. You can then pull the server if you have to and change the hardware.

The servers are all identical, so if we do have issues, we can just pull one from our reserved stash and just replace it. The benefit is that they are all identical, so they are pretty reliable.

We have standardized our network on this equipment, so it makes it easy for maintenance, repairs and just standardizing our images.

We've been with these servers for a long time. We know the book on them and we know the partners who work with us. We have confidence in them, which means we don't need to spend money and waste time on maintenance and other issues unnecessarily.

It's very important for our business that we have a server that's stable and reliable. These servers have been very, very stable and are performing well for us.

The product fits well between tight budgets and horizontal expansions.

No issues with stability or other major issues.

The deployment software.

We were using Dell before and we switched because HP has a range of products that, from our point of view, is exactly what we need. It supports a special power converter that's essential to us that Dell just doesn't have. We don’t need to do a lot of maintenance on the servers, so we need less people needed to manage them. HP provides us with great service as well, which helps us save on costs and other resources.

A few years ago, we had a project for virtualizing all our servers. We chose HP products, services, and storage, including ProLiant servers, for this project. It worked out very well.

I've used 350 disks, had eight disk replacements, and two controllers over three years.

• Performance
• Costs

It was part of a bigger solution, which is VDI. We are able to publish desktops for design engineers whose requirements are continuously changing on a weekly basis.

These servers provide us with very good performance, and the blade technology allows us to do high-performance computing. It's also a really useful product for us because we need its flexibility in adding new components and blades to our existing infrastructure. That's very important for us.

It allows us to provide continuity to the business.

DL servers have fixability to configure, manage and reliability.

you can depend on it in productive environments. 

HPE servers always deliver stunning stability and performance to our customers, and support from HPE is always nice and fast.

It gives you what you need with peace of mind because the system works. Service usually is provided within four hours.

The main benefit was the low price, so it saved us a lot of money.