Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the Rack Servers category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.1, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell Technologies holds a 21.0% mindshare in Rack Servers, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 5.7% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Read 313 Dell PowerEdge R-Series reviews

25,013 Views
20,761 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

Read 25 HPE Apollo Systems reviews

3,294 Views
2,866 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

HPE Apollo Systems

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Dell PowerEdge R-Series and HPE Apollo Systems compete in the enterprise server category. Dell seems to have an edge in pricing and ROI due to its competitive and transparent pricing structure.

Features: Dell PowerEdge R-Series offers scalability, reliability, and intuitive management through iDRAC, with lifecycle management via OpenManage and robust security. HPE Apollo Systems excel in high-density storage and compute capacity for data-heavy applications and AI workloads, providing an adaptable environment with enhanced support for parallel processing.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerEdge R-Series could benefit from better pricing strategies, cleaner interfaces, and improved compatibility with external products. HPE Apollo Systems encounter high pricing challenges and limited scalability, which could improve with more flexible infrastructure integration and enhanced performance analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerEdge R-Series is versatile in deployment options, spanning private and hybrid clouds, with consistently high-rated technical support. HPE Apollo Systems benefit from strong on-premises deployments but have slightly lower customer support ratings and sometimes require improved communication in technical setups.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerEdge R-Series is recognized for its competitive pricing structure and clear licensing, resulting in cost savings and extended ROI. In contrast, HPE Apollo Systems are perceived as more expensive while still delivering solid investment returns in specific configurations like high-density storage.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 912,818 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Ranking in Rack Servers

1st

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

313

Ranking in other categories

Converged Infrastructure (1st), Data Center Networking (3rd), Blade Servers (2nd)

HPE Apollo Systems

Ranking in Rack Servers

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Density Optimized Servers (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Rack Servers category, the mindshare of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is 21.0%, down from 27.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Apollo Systems is 5.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Rack Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerEdge R-Series	21.0%
HPE Apollo Systems	5.7%
Other	73.3%

Rack Servers

Featured Reviews

Tom van Mil

Systems Administrator at Lico Innovations B.v.

Supports flexible hosting needs through seamless upgradability and strong monitoring capabilities

The most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series for me are the feature richness and the upgradability. I really love the way that it is so dynamically applicable for every situation, and they manage to have an all-in-one solution for every single situation. Dell PowerEdge has supported the growth and operational success of my company through its great compute power and price-to-performance ratio. Every time Dell is at the top of its game for us, and there is just no other brand for us that is able to reach that kind of price-to-performance ratio. Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features that specifically cater to the needs of my small company, such as iDRAC. The iDRAC system is a complete feature set for managing servers and hardware technically and monitoring-wise. It really fits in our system and our ecosystem, and monitoring-wise, it is excellent. They have all these sensors available via different protocols and end points, which I love, and the ability to manage and control everything via the iDRAC interface is just a welcome bonus. In our use case, Dell PowerEdge R-Series is very flexible. It is another computer which helps a lot because of the durability over time. They keep running, making scalability for getting more of those resources in our environment so easy.

Read full review

Gökhan DURMAZ

Account Manager at TD SYNNEX

High-quality integration and strong support have optimized our rack server operations

HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity. When I speak about integrity, I speak about GPU integration or other integrations such as GPU integration, backup software integration, and hypervisor integration. Regarding the integration of high-speed interconnectors in HPE Apollo Systems, they impact computational tasks because the high-speed interconnect affects performance. I don't remember the specifics. Regarding the cooling technologies, they help to reduce operational costs. The positive impact I see from HPE Apollo Systems is that support is good and quality is good. In general, HPE Apollo Systems appears to be for rack servers with some optimization capabilities.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The server itself has the most stable updates. The patches and the updates will take you a long way before they release another one, so you aren't constantly doing more updates and upgrades."

"They help us work through things and they're also very competitive on pricing."

"The performance of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is very good."

"I chose Dell PowerEdge R-Series because of the ease of administration, the simplicity, and the continuity of administration over the years."

"Its approach to user security measures is valuable. We haven't experienced any major issues, and the solution has been working really well."

"We have about 80 servers and have only lost maybe two power supplies. They just run forever."

"This is a stable solution."

"PowerEdge servers powered by Intel are highly stable; some of them have stayed on for two years without ever rebooting."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series pros

"It's pretty flexible."

"It's allowed us to compete with cloud storage providers like AWS to put together a scalable on-premises solution of more than 20PB at a similar pricepoint."

"It's very hard for a professor to amass the supercomputing resources, so I've been very fortunate to have that level of supercomputing at our disposal and that has really enabled us to do the world's leading superhuman AI research."

"For us, the most valuable features are the price and density."

"we can use the same platform for several use cases: Hadoop, Ceph, and we are considering the server for another use case right now. It's a single solution, we only have to integrate it once and we can use it for several technologies."

"It's going to meet our needs moving forward, it is scalable."

"We're going to buy another Apollo 6500. We may configure it with half the number of GPUs because that may be all we need. In a sense, we can see the Apollo 6500 being so powerful that we only need half the GPU capability that we have now."

"The most valuable feature is the amount of programming storage available."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

Cons

"There could still be improvements in that area, as there was that one motherboard replacement that had to happen."

"The rate controller interface is difficult to get to without installing additional software. It would be helpful if they had preinstalled software to make that easily accessible."

"One of the things that I've noticed is that over time, the system degrades, meaning that little things don't work. For example, the hard drive would need to be replaced or iDRAC would not be functioning properly. We may have to flash the firmware. It is not like some other hardware where it just runs without issues for four or five years. With Dell, generally, there are little hiccups here and there."

"Using Dell PowerEdge servers has not helped reduce any unplanned production downtime, and I have no comparison available."

"The response time could be better."

"The Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Server did not scale to our expectations."

"The iDRAC Telemetry that monitors PowerEdge system data and provides analytics could be a little bit more in-depth. Someone wanted more information on the RAM and the hard drives and we couldn't retrieve this information."

"The scalability could improve. If you want more scalability and high availability, you will have to change to a solution similar to VxRail."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series cons

"HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved."

"If the workload is not purely sequential, then performance in the IO is less than optimal because it's optimized for streaming processing."

"Our first batch of Apollo servers that we got were so new that it was just hard to know kind of what to expect from HPE and what they wanted to deliver to us."

"The solution could improve the hardware, such as the motherboard or servers. We have had hardware faults in the past."

"If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system."

"The predictive analysis feature could be improved."

"I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second - that would be outstanding."

"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have no issues with the pricing and licensing costs. They are fine."

"It's not a very expensive solution."

"I personally think the pricing and licensing of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is actually fairly decent, though the way the business runs leads to sticker shock anytime we give them a quote."

"When you compare public cloud solutions to PowerEdge in terms of cost, initially the cost of Dell servers or Dell technology was really high. However, right now it's on par or, maybe, even cheaper when we use Dell hardware. If we don't swap it out in three years and if we stretch it to four or five years, then we can get even more of an ROI versus cloud cost."

"The price is reasonable. You have to pay if you want quality. When we purchase something, we have to do some market analysis, and I haven't seen a significant difference compared to other solutions."

"The more complex the server requirements, the more expensive it gets."

"Dell is priced better than alternative solutions."

"There is room for improvement in making it more cost-effective."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is more expensive than Dell which is their main competitor. However, there are times we have managed to receive a comparable price."

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."

"It is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. The standard licensing cost is for the GPU and the features that someone is using. There are additional charges but they depend on the solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	112
Midsize Enterprise	66
Large Enterprise	133

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

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....

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

Unplanned production downtime is a concern. According to our experience, when we run a high workload to a certain level, for example, more than 80% or up to 90%, the system does not perform well. T...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

We run multiple workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, including database and virtual machine workloads. Some of our multi-purpose VM workloads are running databases such as Mongo or Oracle. We serv...

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Apollo?

It is too early to say what improvements HPE Apollo Systems could implement because the report still needs to come out and the customer needs to properly evaluate the solution.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HPE Apollo?

My main use case for HPE Apollo Systems is replacing many of the servers and storage boxes at one of the customer's sites to achieve workload optimization and optimized solutions. Additionally, whe...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering HPE Apollo?

My advice for someone considering HPE Apollo Systems is that if they are looking for consolidation and their workload involves high availability requirements, or if they want to utilize GPUs, then ...

See all answers

Comparisons

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 31% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 8% of the time

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei FusionServer RH Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 4% of the time

HPE Synergy vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series Competitors

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Moonshot vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Lenovo High-Density Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 6% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

September 2026

Download Dell PowerEdge R-Series product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Also Known As

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo

Overview

PowerEdge R-Series delivers high performance, flexibility, and scalability for data centers. It supports demanding tasks with robust management tools and advanced cooling, providing reliability and efficiency across various workloads.

Engineered for large deployments, PowerEdge R-Series supports extensive configurations optimizing performance in data centers. With features like advanced cooling and energy-efficient architecture, it empowers organizations to manage heavy workloads while facilitating seamless scalability. It offers remote management, robust security, and integration with VMware ensuring operational excellence and high availability for business-critical applications.

What are the key features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series?

Scalability: Supports flexible configurations for diverse workloads.
Remote Management: iDRAC and OpenManage facilitate easy oversight.
Energy Efficiency: Architecture helps reduce energy consumption.
Security: Robust features ensure protected performance.
VMware Integration: Enhances manageability and productivity.

What benefits and ROI should you look for?

Performance: Handles high-performance and demanding tasks.
Flexibility: Offers easily upgradable configurations.
Reliability: Provides consistent performance with long-term support.
Efficiency: Reduces energy use and operational costs.
Ease of Use: Simplifies management and maintenance.

PowerEdge R-Series is deployed across industries for virtualization, database hosting, and application servers. It supports environments like VMware and Hyper-V for AI, cloud infrastructure, and computing tasks. Widely used by finance, healthcare, and academia, it enhances reliability and efficiency of IT infrastructure.

Dell Technologies

HPE Apollo Systems deliver high compute and storage density, scalability, and environmental efficiency with exceptional performance for AI initiatives and data capturing across diverse applications.

HPE Apollo Systems are characterized by their dense compute and storage capabilities, offering flexibility in configurations to meet the demands of AI, deep learning, and high-performance computing. Their management software simplifies deployment, ensuring effective performance across tasks that require significant storage. While Apollo Systems are designed for efficiency and scalability, improvements can be made in security, tech support, and integration with hypervisors and backup solutions. Enhancing cooling and licensing processes, connectivity, and faster drive writing capabilities are also areas for growth.

What are the key features of HPE Apollo Systems?

High Compute Density: Supports intense processing needs efficiently.
Scalability: Easily adaptable to growing data demands.
Environmental Efficiency: Minimizes energy consumption, enhancing sustainability.
Flexible Configurations: Caters to a range of applications from AI to data storage.
Reliable Performance: Consistently delivers under various workloads.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Effectiveness: Reduces expenditure with its efficient design.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly fits into diverse IT environments.
Performance Enhancement: Boosts operational efficiency and output.
Easy Deployment: Streamlines the setup process for quick operation.

HPE Apollo Systems find extensive use in sectors such as telecom, supporting high-performance computing and AI workloads. They optimize Linux servers, replace legacy systems, and serve as storage solutions across industries. Their applications span from big data management in Splunk clusters to backup solutions in medical faculties, enhancing compute power and storage within compact racks.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco

Weta Digital

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Free Report: Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

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