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.

I am working as a pre-sales solutions architect. We provide technical solutions. We review a client's requirements and objectives, then provide the appropriate solution to the client. We also review the solution to find the most appropriate option for the client to ensure a good trade-off between technology and cost.

Customers use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to deploy their business-critical applications, and these servers are recommended for VDI solutions. Companies in the financial and retail sectors use these servers to run their business-critical applications. 

We are currently using the 660 models.

The main benefit is from a cost perspective. Comparing the cost of HCI nodes and Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, the latter are much cheaper. Clients can choose tailored servers based on CPU speed, RAM size, and disk types, with various disk options including NVMe, SATA, and SSDs. We can customize the infrastructure servers.

From a cost perspective, they are much more beneficial for clients. We also get the pro deployment support from Dell for new deployments at the client's data center or service provider's data center, along with maintenance services until the end of the term.

Regarding sustainability goals, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers can be upgraded if they have a five-year warranty, and when they reach end-of-support life, they can be replaced with newer technology. Companies focus on upgrading existing servers to reduce costs and provide savings to the client.

As far as energy consumption is concerned, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers consume less energy compared to other servers. If you go with the HCI VxRail, the energy consumption is higher. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers consume less energy compared to other servers. They also come with thermal cooling nowadays, which also reduces the cost. It reduces the power consumption, or means KWA charges in data centers.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not require frequent downtime and can run continuously for up to one year without a hardware reboot. However, to reduce downtime, data centers should have redundancy or resiliency. All servers come with dual power supplies, and vendors provide hardware warranty and replacement within four hours for failed components. Downtime depends on the resiliency of the environment and server configuration. If HA is configured, any faulty hardware part can automatically fail over to another server. Resiliency is maintained at the VMware layer, so if a VM running on some servers goes down, it can move to other servers. 

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers enhance the overall flexibility of the operations. Based on the client's business objective and consumption requirements of the resources of CPU, memory, disk, and storage, we can customize Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We can offer a very competitive price to the client. We get a lot of options as well because multiple models are available in the market, and these servers are robust as well as reliable, and sustainable.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are good for the VDI environment. They are also good for the manufacturing industries, the healthcare sector, the financial sector, and the insurance sector. They are being used in multiple sectors.

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.

Our specific use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involves it being the production and DR equipment we utilize for all of our company's VMs.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is its reliability. Once we transitioned to an all-flash storage solution within the servers and the hyper-converged setup, we haven't had a disk failure in six years. Being able to not worry about hardware on a day-to-day basis is a really big thing for me. By using this reliable system, the combination of the servers and the hyper-converged setup saves us a ton of time on the management side. I remember managing a separate SAN for storage that involved creating LUNs and provisioning virtual disks for VMs. Now, it's just all combined, and we don't have to worry about it in our day-to-day.

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.