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Arista Networks Platform vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Arista Networks Platform delivers good ROI, justifies higher costs with long-term savings, especially compared to Cisco and Juniper.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer reliability, cost savings, easy management, and high performance, with flexibility and excellent support enhancing satisfaction.
By not having to worry about it, I would estimate we save two to four hours a week, depending on what's happening, such as if we need to spin up a new server, which would contribute to more time if done the old way.
In my immediate case for antenna analysis, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer a reduction from days of computing to half a day or hours.
The value of uptime to us is critical.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Arista Networks Platform offers fast, proficient support, praised for direct engineer access and high customer satisfaction globally.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support is praised for expertise and resolution speed but sometimes faces delays and communication issues.
They provide instant support and maintain commitments regarding replacement products.
According to my team’s feedback, we receive extended support from the Arista team.
It has always been scheduled maintenance, which says a lot for a production environment, as we haven't had to call in a trouble ticket for the actual hardware during its entire run.
Typically, the contacts we have on-site are very knowledgeable, they come in within a day and usually have it fixed and taken care of if there are issues.
When we had a power supply failure out of the box, we called support, and they delivered the replacement within four hours as promised.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Arista Networks Platform offers scalable, reliable networking for data centers, praised for network capacity, low latency, and intuitive management.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer scalable solutions for various sectors, facilitating flexibility and efficient growth despite configuration challenges.
Scalability is a key feature of Arista, owing to the possibilities to manage the entire data center network from a single console.
The scalability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is excellent.
Any outages or blackouts are limited to particular servers, not affecting the whole chassis or enclosures.
We bought our product with scaling involved, and we've been scaling it up anytime we've needed more storage.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Arista Networks Platform is highly stable with minimal downtime, praised for reliability when following best practice configurations.
Sentiment score
8.2
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer exceptional reliability and uptime, outpacing alternatives with minimal hardware failures and robust redundancy.
Over four years, we've had less than 1 percent downtime.
There is a feature to update the server while it is running, so there is no need to restart.
We have truly not had any downtime on the infrastructure at all.
 

Room For Improvement

Arista Networks needs better documentation, integration, pricing, security, stability, management, community support, and network feature expansion.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers need improvements in performance, scalability, support, security, pricing, efficiency, and integration with virtualization platforms.
Feature-wise, it addresses most customer requirements.
Arista Networks is currently less popular as they were initially more focused on data centers than campus networks.
We need to know about any upcoming updates so that we can plan accordingly.
The beneficial aspect of that feature was that we could skip the PowerStore and just have the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers alone, as they also served as storage, which helped us save money.
This forces you to go up to a larger server to get the desired processor, which increases the cost.
 

Setup Cost

Arista Networks is costly, with high hardware and licensing expenses, especially compared to Huawei and NETGEAR, affecting affordability.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Server pricing is competitive yet varies, praised for performance and reliability, with bulk purchase discounts available.
Compared to Cisco, Arista routers are significantly cheaper.
Arista products are perceived as costly, especially compared to competitors like Cisco.
They have been stable and running for years without performance downtime or significant disc failures.
Some customers find it cheaper due to contractual agreements, while others find it expensive, especially when scaling up.
The software associated with servers, like VMware subscription licenses, drives costs.
 

Valuable Features

Arista Networks Platform is praised for its reliability, scalability, Linux shell, efficient management, automation, and unmatched monitoring capabilities.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are valued for their performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and management tools, ideal for diverse applications.
Features include plug-and-play auto-discovery, allowing centralized configuration and management.
The most valuable features of Arista include low latency, scalability, and sustainability of the products.
They keep running for at least five to seven years without any issues.
With PowerEdge Servers, I don't need a one-to-one ratio redundancy, which leads to about eighty percent downtime reduction.
One of the valuable features is Active Directory, which helps in managing the network.
 

Categories and Ranking

Arista Networks Platform
Ranking in Data Center Networking
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Ethernet Switches (10th)
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers
Ranking in Data Center Networking
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (3rd), Blade Servers (5th), Rack Servers (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Data Center Networking category, the mindshare of Arista Networks Platform is 15.6%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is 0.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Center Networking
 

Featured Reviews

Md. Ashraf-Ud-Dowla - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhances network security and reliability, but the cost is too high
In Arista Networks Platform, the network building is very good. It is also a wireless network tool, so it can be easily made available for our customers in hours for multiple data centers. For network scaling, it is very easy to adhere to and configure the benefits in the network insights. There is nothing complex since you just add the node and upload the profile, so it is very simplified. Integration process. The integration on a new host is sometimes tricky, but Arista Networks Platform's integration is straightforward.
Syed Masuood - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles workloads and diverse applications efficiently
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Arista Networks Platform?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arista Networks Platform?
Arista products are perceived as costly, especially compared to competitors like Cisco.
What needs improvement with Arista Networks Platform?
Currently, Arista is too costly for its customers. Feature-wise, it addresses most customer requirements. However, we sometimes face challenges when integrating with proprietary protocols and solut...
When shopping for a rack server, would you go with Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem rack servers were the better fit for us. We ultimately decided to go with Dell EMC Poweredge....
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?
It has helped us reduce unplanned downtime by 20% to 30%.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could be improved in areas such as cooling. I've seen some demos of Dell working with Vertiv to manage things such as that, so a combination of air cool and liquid cool....
 

Also Known As

7000 Series
PowerEdge R
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Internet Services
NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
Find out what your peers are saying about Arista Networks Platform vs. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.