Dell PowerEdge XR-Series Reviews

I still have experience with Dell products, particularly as I'm still working with Dell PowerEdge and others. I've been mostly dealing with Dell PowerEdge. We recently deployed Dell PowerEdge to our customers, including the Dell 380 Generation 12 and the Dell 5580 Generation 12. I'm working with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

From running AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge servers, most of the customers that we have are running virtualization on Dell PowerEdge, such as VMware, and some of them are running HCI solutions, which are basically scale computing, Nutanix, and things of that nature.

The features of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series that I find most valuable are the management capabilities, and the iLO management controller is a powerful tool that we use, especially during deployment. It is a very powerful tool for Dell.

Using Dell PowerEdge servers has indeed affected the overall flexibility of my customer's operations and businesses. From the customer point of view, we haven't received any issues in terms of usage. This translates to Dell PowerEdge systems being very powerful machines, and customers are really choosing this system for their infrastructure and deploying their critical workloads, especially for banks. Most of them are running core banking systems from Dell PowerEdge systems, including Oracle databases. We have quite a few customers who have deployed Oracle database there and deployed Oracle VM with virtualization.

For improvements on Dell PowerEdge XR-Series, I suggest enhancements in the support features, such as implementing a feature where the system can call home to Dell support to open a call automatically. Ideally, as a customer, I would just receive a message stating that a call has been opened, and if it's a failed hard disk, it should already be ordered automatically without much intervention for the customer. Many customers rarely check their systems in the data center, so I would love to see major improvements in health monitoring features that allow the system to automatically send alerts to Dell, open calls, and send parts automatically or implement self-healing features whereby a system can detect certain errors and try to correct itself unless it involves something permanent that it cannot correct. These are the features I expect in the new versions of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series to make the management and support of the system easier.

I have been dealing with Dell PowerEdge systems for maybe four to five years.

Using Dell PowerEdge has helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. These systems are very resilient. In a setup where power is actually managed well, the uptime is six nines annually. We hardly hear any unplanned downtime on this system.

The reduction in unplanned production downtime is approximately 99.99, which is six nines. We have almost 0.001% of downtime per year. These systems are very resilient, and it is very rare for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series to go down unless something catastrophic occurs, such as power failures within the whole data center. However, as individual servers, it is very rare for them to fail. While I cannot claim they are 100% failure-proof, I have seen customers continue using Dell systems after they have reached end of life or end of support for maybe an additional two or three years, bringing the total usage to basically seven to ten years that a customer can still use this system without any issue.

Deploying Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is very easy. These are systems that I can say are more of a plug and play approach. There is nothing much difficult in terms of deploying them, and they are very easy to deploy.

We provide implementation for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series. We provide end-to-end solutions that include supply, installation, implementation, as well as support. We do everything for the customer and then hand over the customer once the implementation is done. Mostly in some cases on the application side, that is when they will be able to handle it if they have a different vendor for the application, whether it is the database or something, and then we will be able to present the systems for the application team to do their configuration part. From our side, we handle supply, installation, configuration, as well as the support; we do everything.

Using Dell PowerEdge has helped reduce my customer's total cost of ownership. This is true because most of these customers have consolidated their servers into Dell PowerEdge XR-Series and virtualized to reduce the footprint of their data center. By doing so, we reduce the total cost of ownership of the system.

The approximate reduction in their total cost of ownership is around 40 percent. During that period, it is clear that it reduced total cost of ownership because within seven to ten years, which is a long time for a machine, a business would have already returned their investment.

I find Dell PowerEdge's pricing reasonable. The price has been reasonable until now, and we cannot blame them because any other vendor is facing the same situation. Servers and hardware components are becoming very expensive, and the prices are not stable; they change all the time. Previously, for the last six months or so, the price was acceptable until it changed late last year. Still, even though the price for Dell has increased, it remains very competitive.

I am expecting additional features from Dell PowerEdge in the future, besides the automation features I have already mentioned. Technology is evolving, and we are heading towards HCI technology. I would love to see Dell come with already infused features of HCI, where customers do not need to go around looking for other software features to enhance the virtualization platform on Dell PowerEdge XR-Series. Although there is Dell VxRail, not all customers are at that level, so I believe Dell should look for technology that can accommodate medium and small business customers. The overall review rating I would give is eight.

Our main use case for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the private cloud capability for the company.

What I like the most about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is probably the Redfish manageability, which provides management, remote management, and remote configuration capabilities. Additionally, the C series addresses the corner cases of small-sized locations and provides a solution appropriately sized for these environments. That is probably one of the key benefits—the aggregation and impression in small locations.

These features enable us to renew or open the locations we are in, especially the branch locations, small locations, and remote sites.

I think Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved in appearance. I would say that the improvement opportunity is probably on the monitoring side, the overall monitoring side. I would love to see closer integration with different vendors. As a company, we are still using a multi-vendor approach and cannot go all-in with one single vendor. What we struggle with is that we cannot afford to have three different monitoring systems, management systems, or lifecycle management systems for different environments. I would love to see in the future how that integrates with other vendors as well. Perhaps not as a primary tool, but at least some features and functions from other vendors.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for at least three or four generations now. I would say in the last at least six or seven years.

Regarding the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, at this scale, it is normal to expect some failures. However, I think whenever it exceeds four or five percent of downtime per cabinet, we are at an unexpected rate. All our designs were built with the resiliency to expect that failure, and it has never exceeded that expectation.

I can tell from the example of the PowerFlex solution that Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales fairly well. It may be a lengthy process, but it does what was promised.

I think the customer service and technical support can be a struggle when you are trying to get to the right people; it takes a little time. If we could improve the time from just picking up the phone and calling for help—perhaps not necessarily going through the whole chain of support—it would make getting results quicker. I think this is common across all companies; it is just a process. I would say when you get to the right people, it is a solid eight, probably nine. It is definitely when you get to the right level that you are getting the support you expect.

Positive

We have used other solutions that resemble Dell PowerEdge R-Series before choosing it. We are a multi-vendor company, and we have been acquiring some companies in the past that come in with their own vision, strategies, and equipment. We are always trying to deal with multi-platforms and different vendors.

Regarding the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I think we probably struggle a little bit geographically with different countries. We have never had any negative or less positive experience with Dell in the US, but sometimes Canada or Europe can be a little more challenging, though that is probably due to the market.

We are deploying Dell PowerEdge R-Series pretty much all on-premises across different locations and different sites.

The biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for me is probably just built around the business case—what the business expects. I think it just meets that expectation. From our technical side, I think it just meets the criteria.

The pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is competitive. It is based on the deal and everything involved. I will say that because Dell is a partner of choice for us, that probably states itself.

I have evaluated other systems and other CPU vendors, specifically AMD.

What stood out from those CPU vendors compared to Intel is, I would say, the cost. The cost is probably the key factor right now for AMD. There are some technical nuances that might benefit us, but we do not know what we do not know. Probably for AMD, the key factor was the cost.

My advice for other companies that are considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series right now is absolutely to look into the overall lifecycle and the solution. I think what brings Dell to the table is the flexibility of what you need, what you want to go through, and how the flow of the project goes. The integration partners and on-premises deployment were really well taken care of. I would rate this product and experience as an eight overall.

We are currently using Dell VSAN and also using Dell PowerVault and Dell EMC server storage. We use Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage. Currently, I am using Dell PowerEdge R series. We are using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series for middle-age applications and running on our banking application server. The application is running on top of the R series servers.

I appreciate Dell PowerEdge XR-Series server because everything is integrated and the full solutions are integrated, including firmware and updating. After-sales services and parts availability from the local territory is very important. A few days ago, in this market, everyone was choosing IBM and HP. Dell has beaten them, and right now in the local depot all the parts and accessories are available so that the support-related performance is updated. Another important factor is that the deployment is very easy.

For administration purposes, we have many options. If I segregate it from Dell PowerEdge R755, R7570, R570, and R751, some servers are coming with Intel sockets and some servers are coming from AMD sockets. Recently we also administered image processing and VSAN virtualizations located into administrating in the single hyper-converged platforms.

Recently we deployed the NVIDIA graphics card in the Dell PowerEdge R740 server, which is a rack server. We did not purchase the dedicated AI or image processing server. We cloned it. First, we purchased one server from Dell and then we put the NVIDIA graphics card into it.

We can control everything in a single console, and in comparison with other vendors, managing all the servers in a single platform involves some cost. On behalf of Dell, it is integrated with solutions so we can manage everything at a single point and manage multiple servers in a single concept. The manageability is very easy, which is why we are choosing the Dell console.

The total cost of ownership is also reduced with some scalability. When choosing Dell PowerEdge servers, they can be scalable. When choosing the five-node hyper-converged HCI in a virtual environment, we can scale out and the total cost of ownership has been reduced. The number of bare metal services will be reduced.

There is reduced downtime because we created a redundant cluster. For every server we created it in the cluster mode. There is an active server and there is a passive server. If the active is down, then the passive will become active. Some applications are also running in the active-active and active-passive mode.

If I compare it with other things, every other vendor has hardware, software, and operating systems, but Dell is not focused on the operating systems. IBM has its own hardware and own operating systems and HP also has its own hardware and own operating system such as HP-UX and IBM also has AIX. IBM also acquired Red Hat and HP also has HP-Tru64 Linux. In comparison with them, Dell hardware and services are good and fine, but they do not have any own operating systems. Dell is not owning any operating systems. If Dell owned any operating systems, then if I compare with other things such as Sun Solaris, they have a Sun operating system and also Sun hardware. There is a major thinking around this. It would be great for Dell operations if they had hardware and operating systems software as well.

I have been using this solution for almost twenty-four years.

We purchased Dell PowerEdge through our local partner.

The setup is very simple and easy. They have software for installation that anyone can run, and there are some steps to the installation.

Both are being used. The solution is more flexible. The functionality is strong. I am getting better support and I would rate this aspect at eight. The main competitor is HP, perhaps the model is HP ProLiant server. In our local depot services, considering the spare parts replacements times and the service durations, I am supporting them because of that in our territory. There is an inbuilt service for energy reduction and energy services which is integrated with the Intel solutions and which is acquired on the Dell server. My overall rating for this review is nine.

This is mainly for the edge. For example, if you have a customer with a requirement to process data on the edge rather than on-site data center, that can be at a contracting site, on a ship in the sea, or in a retail shop.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series offers multiple configurations that can run in outside data center environments without the need for standard cooling and power. The modular design includes a small chassis with multiple slots for compute sleds, which helps customers with expandability.

Modularity ensures that everything is compartmentalized with a chassis containing shared parts. If there is a problem on a certain compute or sled, it will not affect the full cluster or data center because it only impacts that part. For example, if there is a power issue or a problem with a disk, it does not affect everything or the full data center.

Redundant power supply is very important because in these kinds of setups, if one power supply goes down, you need to ensure that you are running in a fully redundant environment in terms of power. It is important to ensure that this is configured as redundant power supply so that if one goes down, the full workload can be taken by the other power supply.

Security is built with a zero trust approach, meaning everything is built from the BIOS and firmware with a zero trust approach in mind. This ensures that no unauthorized access is happening to the device.

RAID is very important to protect the data by creating a redundant copy or protection for your storage. When writing data, you need to ensure that if one disk fails, you can restore your data. This is very important. Within this kind of chassis inside the server, we are using SSDs, NVMEs, and hard drives. The PERCs that support different types of drives are again very important. Normally NVMe is meant to run without a PERC and should be run directly on the bus, which gives something like a software RAID.

When creating the RAID, it depends on how critical the data is. For example, it can be single drive failure protection, double drive failure protection, or full redundancy through mirroring of the data. If you have a most critical environment where you need to ensure data is up and running even in case of a disk failure, then full mirroring of the data is the approach. However, this will impact the utilization of your capacity. If I have, for example, 10 TB of raw data, full mirroring will result in 5 TB usable for customers to write data because the other five will be only for protection. For less critical data, single drive failure protection like RAID 5 can provide 75% usable space compared to mirroring, which means 7.5 TB usable space compared to 5 TB.

Scalability is possible through scale up and scale out approaches. When speaking about scalability, it is very important to work from the design point of view. From a design perspective, we understand customer requirements and based on that, you need to design for plus maybe 30 to 50% for three to five years. We need to ensure that customers can scale within five years and add items easily. Additionally, you can scale out by adding new nodes to the cluster. Scalability is not an issue in terms of the platform itself but mainly depends on if the customer's data centers have adequate power, cooling and space. Sometimes scalability can be an issue if customers have hosted their environment with a managed services provider. In that case, they do not need to consume more power or more virtual machines. That is why they need to ensure that whatever server they have is capable of being scaled internally with components like adding more memory DIMMs, adding more drives, or adding more GPUs so that there are enough PCIe cards. When it comes to the CPU, we prefer not to scale the CPU itself. If you scale the CPU, it means you need to scale out by adding nodes which will be more visible.

On the point of technical support, I am not saying this is a disadvantage, even though it was highlighted. The technical team is capable to manage support, but the discussion refers to ensuring that we are selling the right support contract to our customers and setting the right expectation from day one. This can be better and could be improved.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is very popular and we are selling this as a standard. Dell actually has a very smart approach these days to selling Dell PowerEdge XR-Series through a purpose-built design. This makes it very smart as normally servers are very customizable in terms of configuration, which gives customers and partners the choice to customize based on customer requirements. However, this flexibility needs to be controlled by a compatibility matrix to ensure best practices. This should be controlled from the architect perspective. Sometimes for price and design, these guidelines or best practices are not followed. When speaking about purpose-built devices, it is an appliance that takes this appliance with the best practice configuration to ensure that there are fewer performance issues.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is following the trend in the markets. Dell is moving with what is happening in the compute industry. There are no customers now with requirements for blade servers. Blades are still in Dell but may be going end of sale as a blade because the compute is now moving into GPUs and plates with chassis, which will limit the power and cooling. I feel Dell is going with what is happening in the compute industry, which is towards mainly rack-mounted servers.

All Dell PowerEdge servers now have a price impact due to inflation and shortages happening with memory and SSD drives, NVMe drives, and even some CPUs. Intel CPUs have longer lead times these days, particularly some of the 16th generation CPUs. This is what is impacting the increase in price because in discussions with customers, they are now negotiating more on availability than price. If a customer needs something available very soon, they do not ask about targeted prices.

In the latest models for Dell PowerEdge servers, they can support many more cores per platform. This higher number of cores supports more DIMMs, better PCIe cards, and we are working with some customers on consolidation platforms. For example, if customers have 15 or 10 old servers that are five years old, we are consolidating all these platforms into four or five servers because now there are more powerful platforms available. The power and cooling will be less in terms of quantity, but we need to use more power supplies to support the environment.

We are competing with other vendors such as Supermicro, Lenovo, and HPE, especially in the AI trend. Dell has a complete story behind AI and the main building block of AI is GPU servers, where Dell is playing a big role in the market and their go-to-market strategy. It is not about selling a server with a GPU but rather selling customers a solution.

What we discussed about zero trust, RAID, and the redundancy of power, as well as memories and CPUs and everything else, the redundancy here happens by design. For example, power supply design can be redundant to ensure that if there is a power supply issue, the full server is running on a single power supply until a replacement is made. By design, when speaking about RAID, you ensure that when you create the virtual machines inside the server, you duplicate the virtual machines in different nodes so that the server itself is very capable of running fully redundant. Even when speaking about network cards, you have multiple options to add and can add multiple network cards to avoid a single point of failure.

I would rate this review overall as a nine out of ten.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series server was deployed for a cybersecurity application based on a recommendation from the vendor of the security software. Based on this recommendation, we have already integrated the server and installed all cybersecurity applications over it. It keeps working fine, and we have very little issues with this product.

Regarding security features, you need to have some type of protection if you are talking about data center security. You should monitor all the servers all the time and have another layer of security level in order to secure the server itself. If you talk about the application running over it for security reasons, it would be much better to have another layer of security to protect the data center.

The most positive aspect of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is the availability, which is very high, and the support and services are very good. We find that if we need to do any replacement of any hard disk or something, we also have back support from the vendor. During the last five years, we have had very few cases with Dell servers. It is actually very stable, and there are no issues; maybe only one hard disk failed during this time, which is great, and I was actually surprised because we compared it with HP as well. It is very reliable.

There is also RAID protection for each of the hard disks. If you configure this with RAID 1 or RAID 5, whatever redundancy feature you select is mandatory now. RAID for the server is no longer an option; you need it for any application or something like this. You should have hardware protection level from the vendor to increase the availability for any solution.

I suggest virtualizing the CPU between multiple operating systems on the same server. Many vendors, like Nutanix, are already doing this. If you have this feature, you can partition the server itself, allowing multiple operating systems to run at the same time, and manage partitions on CPU and memory levels.

We need to concentrate more on virtualization and know how to deploy this for virtualized applications more effectively. If more features could be provided for this, that would be great.

I have been dealing with the products for maybe six years now.

We did not face any issue with performance since we installed this one until the end of the service contract; we did not need to do any upgrade or something for the processor. For all servers, we are comparing CPUs, so if you have already selected the right product from the beginning, you usually do not face any performance issues. The issue can happen if you did not select the right product from the beginning or have not planned properly to match with the application requirements.

We did not face any downtime for these servers. I can say it is more than ninety-nine percent uptime.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is scalable. You can actually increase the performance if you need to add more CPU, more hard disks, and these things. From the beginning, the issue is that you should select the right series and right product to plan for extending and expanding performance if required by any application. If you did not consider this from the beginning, it will be an issue.

I would rate Dell's technical support a nine.

Positive

I worked with HP for a long time and I worked with Dell for five to six years. I can see both are very good competitors and are close to each other. HP and Dell consistently provide the best performance and reliability across all series—not just one series, but for all Blade, Rack, and everything. They are very similar to each other. There may be some differences in storage; for example, HP might have more series of storage solution systems. However, Dell, after integrating EMC with Dell together, has become very powerful on the storage level as well.

The installation and deployment process is straightforward if you understand how to manage the management port of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series, similar to HPE management port. If you have experience with HP, you can easily manage Dell also. Both have very good tools to manage and do deployment easily, and you can also do the deployment remotely without any issue.

We have done this project on-premise for Dell.

The ROI for Dell and HP is approximately very high and competitive, and very close to each other. There is no big difference when comparing availability and such.

Regarding the price, Dell is slightly less expensive than HP, maybe in our area. I don't know about Europe, but in the Middle East, Dell prices are usually slightly better than HPE in an apple-to-apple comparison.

Apart from virtualization, everything else is alright.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series has some internal diagnostic tools. You can actually monitor all of the hardware, and you can get all the logs and trace them if any issue happens or if you want to do preventive maintenance. You can look at the logs of the Dell diagnostic tools and find out if any proactive services need to be done or something like this.

I didn't see any type of bottleneck that I can advise to go through. Any hardware is actually well done by most vendors, especially if you're talking about HP or Dell or Lenovo. Many years of experience have helped enhance and increase performance. For the time being, I can't see any major issues; maybe virtualization could be improved since most vendors are moving towards virtualization features.

I have been in this sphere for more than twenty years now. Most of my experience has been with HP, especially the HP and three-series storage.

My overall rating for this review is nine.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series serves as the infrastructure for all of my open-source applications, which support various online businesses. We operate in online matrimony, online education, online real estate, and online job portals. These applications function as application servers, middleware, caching layers, and even run AI workloads with Nvidia GPUs. We have databases and data lakes running on this infrastructure, but mostly on open source.

I find that all these platforms support most of the open source, so we do not have many challenges from a driver standpoint, from an operating system or the application stack standpoint.

There is no specific requirement that I use a specific version of the application or operating system. They are quite open in terms of what to use on that. At the same time, from the configuration standpoint, I can customize the complete infrastructure.

The benefits from the AI workloads that run on my backend algorithms are significant, providing real-time stats for user-specific personalized or hyper-personalized recommendations. In the case of jobs, it fetches based on all my search criteria running on this, bringing out the best matches between jobs and the skills required for that particular position.

There are two main advantages as a customer: performance, which is stable, and the support, which is quite good. Whenever I had any specific challenges, whether in terms of firmware upgrade or any hardware failure, the support has been pretty decent. At the same time, the life cycle of these servers makes a lot of sense for me, almost 8 to 10 years, which gives me the complete ROI for whatever infrastructure investments I have made.

There is a visible business ROI.

At this moment, the energy consumption is higher, depending on whether it is with or without GPUs. With GPUs, almost 6 to 7 KVA is the normal usage. Without GPUs, probably per server around 800 KVA, which is quite affordable. If it goes below that, I would love to consume energy in that way.

Certainly, the first negative aspect is the cost because the biggest challenge today is the way component costs are going higher. At times I struggle with the configuration I want and the kind of configuration I am looking for, making cost the main driver.

Apart from price and cost, I think the rest of the integrations are quite good because I have a hyper-converged network that supports all of them. I do have a hybrid infrastructure with other partner servers and OEM servers, and it integrates quite well.

I would still rate the product at nine points because I do not normally give a 10 to anybody due to the reasoning that there is always scope for improvement. I always look forward to reducing the cost while increasing compute power with lesser power usage, which is what any organization looks forward to.

I have been dealing with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series for almost more than 10 years now.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series helps reduce unplanned production downtime as it is stable.

It is easy to scale, and scalability is not a big challenge.

It is a hybrid model for deployment.

I may not have the right quantified percentage or number to calculate that aspect.

I would rate my experience with support at somewhere around nine points.

I have worked with HP before.

The deployment procedure and installation are quite straightforward.

My implementation was with some other vendors.

For Total Cost of Ownership, I take the complete value out of it, so for me it certainly makes a lot of sense.

From a price perspective, Dell is much more flexible compared to other vendors based on my experience.

I am a customer with Dell only.

Regarding Dell, I do not use any of the PowerScale, PowerStore, or any other specific products, but I do have Dell ECS in the environment along with a couple of Dell Access series. I also have Dell PowerEdge XR-Series servers and Elastic Storage of Dell, so there are a couple of products I use.

The deployment procedure and installation are quite straightforward.

I find that all these platforms support most of the open source, so I do not have many challenges from a driver standpoint, from an operating system or the application stack standpoint.

I would rate this review at nine points overall.

My role in using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series involves having a lab in our main location and helping my customers design and deploy all the servers. I have been using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series since they first came out. It is mainly to get customers' feet wet with being able to run AI on-premises, which are my main use cases for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

Running AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge XR-Series enables quick time to market and allows customers' ideas to come to fruition in a much faster way than trying to build it all yourself.

The hardware of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is really well put together in a way that makes it easy to design, get it built quickly, and deliver it to customers very fast without having to go through a whole lot of design meetings. It is bundled together, which is nice.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series has affected the overall flexibility of my operations or business in every company I have been in. The way Dell PowerEdge XR-Series ties together with great support makes for a seamless experience. The generations do not come too fast to where you feel caught off guard by a newer model. They last a long time, and there is a lot of thought that went into designing not only the hardware but also the management software behind all of it and how it all ties in so you can manage it.

Deployment and ease of use and management are top notch. Using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series servers has helped reduce my Total Cost of Ownership. The experience with pricing, setup, cost and licensing of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is easy, and the Dell team is great.

Being able to offer AMD options in Dell PowerEdge XR-Series would be a nice improvement. Nvidia has been performing exceptionally well, but once AMD becomes available, it would be nice to have a little bit of choice. That could also make an impact on how much this costs to customers because competition always brings things down. I would be looking forward to an AMD solution.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series since they first came out.

I am not sure about the XRs in Dell PowerEdge XR-Series. We have not really had any customers that have downtime with them. Throughout my entire career, Dell has been probably the most reliable server brand I have used in my many years of overseeing IT and selling.

I rate customer service and technical support for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series among the highest. The completeness of the solution of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series stood out to me in my evaluation process, both positive and negative, when compared with other options. The Dell teams are always knowledgeable, always great to work with, and always on top of their game. When we partner with them to do any type of solution with a customer, it is always fantastic. The product itself and the team behind it are both exceptional.

Some of our customers prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge XR-Series used cloud services to try to explore AI options, such as AWS or Azure. Some of them were building their own custom solutions, and of course, it never worked out. Having Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is beneficial because it comes built to do the task that it needs to accomplish, as opposed to having to assemble something together from disparate parts.

I am not sure about return on investment with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series. This type of technology is still so much in its infancy in a lot of our customers, so they do not really have a baseline to measure against. Because this is often their first deployment of this kind, I cannot really answer this question.

I could not put a number on it, but I have served customers where we have been able to consolidate many racks of servers into just a single rack. So it is definitely more efficient. When you do things right, it makes the customers happy.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is getting better and better, and I would assess it for energy consumption positively. With AI workloads, they are just hungry for power. There is only so much you can do until the technology improves and becomes more efficient at everything, not just the hardware end, but the software end as well.

Talking about sustainability is one of the things I present to my customers regarding Dell PowerEdge XR-Series. It is definitely a key component because as everything gets more expensive, specifically energy costs, and being able to have those assets longer while also having them be robust enough in their power usage so they do not break the bank when it comes to powering infrastructure is critical. I would rate this review an overall 8 out of 10.

I use Dell PowerEdge XR-Series for high-end applications, management installation of Active Directory, application installs, ESXi host for virtualization, and other components.

If it doesn't give value for banking to be using it for their core application, it won't be successful, but it is a very good server and a very good high-end server that gives compatibility, and the performance also is pretty good.

I do work with the dual power supply feature.

The way the dual power supply helps is in case there is a power failure on one of the legs; because of the dual power supply, you won't have downtime, meaning that your system will still be up and running pending the time you rectify the one that has an issue. That is the essence of dual power supply.

It does help to protect my organization with advanced security features.

It helps to protect in the sense that the data is more secure, as it's not being breached by an outsider.

Data redundancy is very important for my company in the sense that I need to create a RAID on my OS; in case one drive fails, I wouldn't have to lose my data. Whether it is a RAID 1 or RAID 5, it depends on the type of RAID configuration I choose during my setup of the system.

I've not seen any negative side. The only thing I can see is the board, maybe the power input that enters the board; because there was one that I was using before that the board had an issue. It might be that the power input from the source that damaged the board. There can be a protection regarding that, which I think would be pretty good so that the board will not be damaged.

I suggest a protection mechanism that can protect the power issue from damaging the board.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series for six years now.

I don't see any problems with performance in extreme conditions.

It's generally stable. Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is stable.

There is no limitation in scalability with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

It's excellent regarding technical support from Dell.

Positive

I have been using some other rack servers from other vendors, particularly HP.

Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is a super server, so compared to HP, I see big differences from the technical side.

It's very straightforward for deployment.

I worked together with the Dell team for deployment, and at times, when I purchased, I did the deployment myself.

I have seen some return on investment since I'm using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

I can say it's around 40%.

That's both for time saving and money saving with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

In terms of pricing, it depends on the configuration I set during the quote and the configuration I try to make use of. It might also depend on the processor, the number of RAM, the type of CPU, and the number of drives that I want to be in the server itself. The price varies.

I gave this review a rating of 10.

My major use cases for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series are for a hyper-converged solution.

If I had to say something positive about it, the biggest benefit is the good compatibility with third-party software such as VMware or Nutanix.

The performance of the product in extreme conditions is good; it can run in critical workloads with not much hardware issue.

We use a dual power supply feature.

To explain how it helped improve system uptime, it can ensure that during power maintenance in the data center, it can continue to operate.

I see it is beneficial for my company, and regarding security for Dell, it has the disk encryption capability which helps us to achieve compliance easily.

I see areas for improvement in Dell PowerEdge XR-Series as sometimes there is some delay during the boot time;

we occasionally need to disable some ROM options to prevent a boot delay or a network boot loop.

I have been using the XR series Dell PowerEdge XR-Series since 2019.

It is mostly stable.

Regarding the scalability of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series, it is easy to scale.

Regarding technical support, I think it is good and good enough.

I would give about a nine for Dell support on a scale of zero to 10.

Positive

Generally, I find it quite easy to deploy Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

It is quite easy to deploy Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

We have a reseller and an SI company, but our engineers did it by themselves most of the time.

I do see some ROI with Dell PowerEdge XR-Series, for example, like savings in time and money.

It is kind of hard to say definitively, but I can say it is about a three-year ROI.

I calculate the ROI based on reutilization, and I think it is about three years.

Regarding the price of the product, compared to other vendors, I think the price makes sense; it is not that competitive, but it is affordable.

I compare pricing with HP and the Huawei brand, the X-Sphere or something similar.

In the cases of Lenovo and HP, the pricing model is better.

If we compare solutions technically, I think that Dell and HP are basically almost equivalent in terms of features, but Dell can be more user-friendly.

I still work with the same products, and I am still using Delinea, AWS, and CyberArk.

From the Delinea side, I work only with Secret Server.

From AWS, I am using RDS and EKS.

To summarize what solutions I am using from AWS Cloud, I utilize microservice architecture on AWS, and with Control Tower, I can see the granular security fine-tuned for a large organization.

Regarding the product Wickr, I am not using it for instant communication, security, and compliance.

I am exploring solutions such as a VDI solution and a Desktop as a Service solution. I only explore today; I am not using VDI products.

Regarding security products, we are using Dell and Cisco ACI.

Regarding Cisco XDR, I am not using it.

For servers, I am using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

The series is a rack server; I forgot the model.

I think we have both the XR series and XE series.

Regarding the XR2 modularity aspect, I am not sure.

Data redundancy from RAID configurations is currently not as important for me because we have software-defined storage that can control data durability; thus, the RAID configuration is less important nowadays.

My overall review rating for this product is 8 out of 10.

My use case for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is rack servers, which host the virtual machines for our VoIP solution from Avaya.

The best features in Dell PowerEdge XR-Series are all-flash storage, which is easy to implement and install, and it was also easy to upgrade.

The advanced security features in our organization help protect the infrastructure as we work in the energy industry of oil and gas, helping to protect data and privacy.

In Dell PowerEdge XR-Series, I do not have any problems but am thinking about an area of improvement.

Customization could be improved; more customization options are needed.

I would like more customization on reports and analytics.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge XR-Series for almost two years because we made the data center technology refresh from two years ago, renewing all the hardware.

I rate the stability as 10, so it is a stable product.

I also rate the scalability of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series as 10.

I rate the technical support as very good; we did not contact them much for support, but maybe one or two times they were replacing the storage.

From 1 to 10, I rate the support as 10.

Positive

Right now, I do not have any other solution from other vendors, but during the evaluation time, at the beginning of the tender, it was either Dell solutions or HP solutions. We mainly decided to go with Dell solutions according to Dell PowerStore and Dell Net domain. The server is not in the evaluation metrics that much, but perhaps the price is slightly more than other solutions.

It took a few days for Dell PowerEdge XR-Series to be deployed.

All the company uses the data center but not through direct interfacing; it hosts the virtual machines, which contain business applications for everything, including HR applications, SAP applications, storage and shared folders, printing service, SharePoint services, and all the services, so almost all the company utilizes the whole infrastructure.

Approximately 500 people in my company use Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

We did not calculate return on investment, but it is around 10%.

The pricing of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is cost-efficient.

The pricing of Dell PowerEdge XR-Series is cost-efficient.

Data redundancy from RAID configurations decreases read and access time by approximately 20%.

It is easy to do maintenance on Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

Maintenance takes place each quarter.

I recommend Dell PowerEdge XR-Series.

I give this product an overall review rating of 9.