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Cisco Nexus 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
7.6
Cisco Nexus offers strong ROI with cost savings, reliability, and ease of use, balancing initial costs with long-term benefits.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer reliability, cost savings, easy management, and high performance, with flexibility and excellent support enhancing satisfaction.
Speeding up our response times and reducing errors and incidents with automation and available APIs.
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
7.3
Cisco Nexus boasts responsive, knowledgeable support with quick resolutions, though service quality sometimes varies between representatives or escalation steps.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support is praised for expertise and resolution speed but sometimes faces delays and communication issues.
For us, we have a time advantage because we know the solution, and the technological refresh is easier.
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
7.7
Cisco Nexus offers scalable solutions for enterprises, supporting numerous nodes with flexibility despite cost concerns.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer scalable solutions for various sectors, facilitating flexibility and efficient growth despite configuration challenges.
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
Cisco Nexus is highly stable, with minor bugs, improved reliability, and long uptime, enhancing user satisfaction significantly.
Sentiment score
8.2
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer exceptional reliability and uptime, outpacing alternatives with minimal hardware failures and robust redundancy.
Initially, the stability of Cisco Nexus, particularly with the ACI, was problematic due to unstable codes, requiring replacements.
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

Cisco Nexus requires better GUI, programmability, multi-tenancy support, simplified licensing, improved tools, automation, integration, and competitive pricing.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers need improvements in performance, scalability, support, security, pricing, efficiency, and integration with virtualization platforms.
When I talk about data centers, which are critical infrastructure and centralized application hubs, the Nexus platforms should be highly stable.
The solution is on-premises and stable.
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

Cisco Nexus pricing is high, with complex licensing and significant costs, though discounts are possible through negotiation.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Server pricing is competitive yet varies, praised for performance and reliability, with bulk purchase discounts available.
The price of Cisco Nexus is on the higher side due to the premium services Cisco offers.
All solutions are very expensive and not an economy solution.
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

Cisco Nexus is praised for flexibility, scalability, strong security, and ease of use, making it ideal for data centers.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are valued for their performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and management tools, ideal for diverse applications.
The VPC feature of Cisco Nexus is great because it provides an active-active way of forwarding the traffic and avoids blocking any of the links.
For us, we have a time advantage because we know the solution, and the technological refresh is easier.
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

Cisco Nexus
Ranking in Data Center Networking
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
LAN Switching (3rd)
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 Cisco Nexus is 19.3%, up from 16.3% 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

Vinayak Lokare - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhancing data center network efficiency with reliable security integrations and good switching
Cisco Nexus provides a reliable switching platform for our data centers. It allows us to run dynamic routing protocols and helps improve network efficiency with features like MPLS. Additionally, it supports integration with third-party security tools, which is advantageous for our network architecture. Security-wise, we utilize Cisco's solutions while exploring other vendor options too.
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
23%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 Cisco Nexus?
The product's initial setup phase is very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Nexus?
The price of Cisco Nexus is on the higher side due to the premium services Cisco offers. Despite the cost, it offers valuable features and services.
What needs improvement with Cisco Nexus?
When I talk about data centers, which are critical infrastructure and centralized application hubs, the Nexus platforms should be highly stable. Initially, the codes I received through ACI were qui...
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

No data available
PowerEdge R
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Banco de Guayaquil, Baylor Scott & White Health, BH Telecom, Bowling Green State University, Calligaris, Children's Hospital Colorado, City of Biel, Del Papa Distributing, Department of Justice, Dimension Data, Dualtec Cloud Builders, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), Hertz, K&L Gates , LightEdge, Lone Star College System, Management Science Associates, Mindtree, NBC Olympics, Quest, Sony Corporation, The Department of Education in Western Australia, Valley Proteins
NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Nexus vs. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.