Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers Reviews

We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers primarily in a virtualized environment for our company. Our company performs all different types of functions, from finance to healthcare, to all kinds of different business lines. We run all the internal proprietary applications on our Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

I would say Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have supported growth and operational success for my company. It's a little outside of PowerEdge. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers work with Dell's PowerFlex, a hyper-converged infrastructure. 

The compute side is Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with PowerFlex storage. We are in the middle of a lifecycle management where we're refreshing a lot of our new infrastructure with the Dell PowerFlex, which includes Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. 

One of our latest acquisitions is in the healthcare business, and we're buying all new Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with PowerFlex storage.

An example of the use cases for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in my company is that we use them for virtualization platforms; currently, it's VMware, so the host that VMware sits on.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for me, my team, and the company is iDRAC. It's more user-friendly than the HPE products, and we can access them remotely, which is very important when we have a global presence, especially at smaller sites where we don't have a person on-site. So, iDRAC really helps us to get into that platform and do maintenance and things like that remotely.

The reliability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is another benefit I've realized from their usage. 

They look great, have a nice LCD on them, and are easy to manage and maintain in racks.

My team manages four data centers where we use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to host our customers. We also use them ourselves for internal purposes. We have certain software platforms that we build in-house, which are homegrown, that we use on a daily basis on those servers. We also have some third-party software that we host on them that we use within the team.

As an automotive dealer management system provider, we provide hardware and software to automotive dealers using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We deploy a server on-site running Windows, and then our application along with the database. We can have it on-prem in the dealership, or if they prefer, we can host it, and we will do the same thing as a virtual machine in one of our data centers.

We really appreciate the security features that are built into the iDRAC within Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. They are modular, and we can build and request servers in the same way, whether it's now, six months from now, or a year from now. They're consistent. The user experience is consistent across them. It doesn't matter if you're logging into a T160 or a T350, or an older T330, that experience is the same across the board. Even with the new versions of iDRAC, technicians and our support teams are comfortable logging in and can navigate around easily enough without having to learn something new.

There are cost benefits of using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. Since we buy many of them, plus they're smaller, they're very efficient regarding CPU and power. We can max out that process on that RAM and have it run four or five years without worrying about having any issues or thermal problems.

There is essentially no learning curve. The iDRAC features are heavily used for our out-of-band management with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. Other servers have similar products, and having the license included with the server is beneficial rather than as an additional charge later.

We're working on implementing support agents and business intelligence work within the next year, currently determining our hardware needs and data storage requirements.

Due to the fact that we use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in both data centers and dealerships, we can move workloads seamlessly. If a dealership wants to move to a hosted environment, we can transfer that workload from the physical server directly to our data center, and vice versa.

New Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers consistently perform better as technology improves. The progression from 7200 RPM disks to 10K disks, 15K disks, and now to SSDs and NVMe storage has led to substantial improvements. As NVMe generations advance from Gen4 to Gen5, the throughput improves significantly. Newer servers with updated technology provide faster throughput, more IOPS, and less power consumption with solid-state storage. The newer Xeon processors are more power-efficient while handling increased workload.

We have both the XE line servers in our data center that we're using for large language model. 

We also have, with our new fresh deployment going into stores, deploying four Nvidia L4 cards. We're doing inferencing at the edge for our dwell apps, for security stuff, for loss prevention. So a lot of AI work is going into that on those Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

Our partnership with Dell provides a consistent platform across our 1800 locations.

All of our server infrastructure is PowerEdge, and it's all HCI PowerEdge.

By having Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we wanted density. We wanted to have a small power and cooling footprint. That's why we have PowerEdge and VxRail.

The most valuable feature is OpenManage. We get a lot out of OpenManage because we have a sprawling infrastructure with around 100 data centers, and managing all of those separately is challenging. The automation built into OpenManage for firmware upgrades and life cycle management really helps us out.

We normally do rack for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, and we started buying the VX rails, which is based on the same platform too. 

Most of the time, we're doing this for more compute with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We have a standard workload and usually run mostly bare metal on most of our platform, except when we do the VX rail, which then we use the ESXi VMware for that one. It is all Linux based. 

The nice benefit with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers was that we moved from an Intel platform, started buying more 7525s, more of the AMD-based processors because we can get higher four counts, more dense memory, so that's been our transition.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that it's very common. 

We've seen a lot of reliability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. I just turned off a server that's been on for 11 years. That was a 410 that ran forever. From our point of view, they get good value in what they bought, and it continues to run, so we continue to buy them. It's a very stable, reliable product. The biggest benefit compared to HP is the iDRAC feature. HP has an iLO, but we've had more issues with that and its configuration than we have with the iDRAC and its configuration of the Dell server itself.

We've been impacted by data center issues with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, however, typically not from the server side. We have only lost maybe two power supplies out of about 80 servers. They just run forever.

The use cases for implementing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are mainly in warehouses and manufacturing sites to ensure they can effectively utilize IoT devices. 

For instance, a customer has livestock that they brand with barcodes to maintain their health and monitor their consumption, and all these IoT devices are rolling throughout their facilities, gathering data in real-time for assessments. This technology at the edge is very helpful for them.

The features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support AI initiatives by providing compute and storage at the edge, enabling the creation of a lot of real-time information and making that information available to AI capabilities, which helps drive outcomes more quickly. 

From a VAR perspective, the most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are our ability to implement the infrastructure and make it readily available for our customers. 

Customers share with us their experiences, highlighting reliability, ease of use, maintenance, and lifecycle management. They frequently mention that this equipment doesn't break, stating it works and functions reliably.

We are primarily using it for test development environments. We have VMs hosted on them, and we use them to run our internal applications, customer environments, dev setup, common projects, the development environment, and the UAT environment in the service.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty good at handling diverse applications. We get good performance from it. 

We have a lot of VMs on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. On a single server, we have probably hosted 14 or 15 VMs. Out of these, 8 to 10 are continuously running, and four of them are backup VMs, so it can handle a good workload.

For cybersecurity, it is only accessible on the intranet; it is not accessible through the web. We use it for local development purposes, and it is behind our firewall. Its security is strong. We handle a lot of test data for government and confidential customers. It is safe and strong locally. We have not experienced any security issues.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime if we need to replace a hard disk, instead of completely shutting a server, there is a hot swap feature. It is quite good in that aspect. Usually, for any activity, there is a downtime of about 30 minutes. It has saved a lot of time.

We have tried AI workloads for a development environment for a government customer in Singapore. The servers are hosted in Singapore. It is an ML-based engine with AI. It is a government project where data is processed, and we run it on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The benefit of running AI workloads on PowerEdge Servers is that it is easy to allocate memory. The application we are running is memory intensive. It is pretty easy to scale memory and storage.