Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs IBM Power Systems comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers
Ranking in Rack Servers
1st
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Power Systems
Ranking in Rack Servers
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Rack Servers category, the mindshare of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is 27.5%, up from 26.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Power Systems is 9.0%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Rack Servers
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

KV
Nov 29, 2023
It's very easy to get new systems in the data center and to get them ready for production
I'm currently not running into specific cases that I'd say we could improve. Of course, the most important features are security and sustainability. Those are subjects that Dell does a lot of work on. The whole industry works a lot on it, but everyone also sets goals of being sustainable. Working together on those subjects, I'd say could help us achieve those goals together. Sustainability and the data center is a hot topic. I work for the airport and we want to be the most sustainable airport in the world. So starting with our IT stack could benefit. The most important for us is once someone gets access to a system that we don't want them to have access to, it probably won't be physical access. What will a system do to detect besides all the software we have in place? And right now, I'm not really aware of what the PowerEdge stack does for us in those scenarios, but that's an interesting use case. I would like more resilience because, for all companies, cybersecurity is important. Once something goes wrong, then we'll see the whole business go along. Within the IT department, we have to be ahead of that.
Md Al-Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 14, 2023
Flexible with good performance and uptime
We use the solution as a database server. The core banking database runs on IBM Power LAPR with terabytes of memory (20 TB of database size). Performance and availability is top-notch. With database clustering, we ensure the high availability of our database. Runtime resource allocation made life…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the Dell EMC management and we have a great management interface. They are very reliable and we can trust the server. It's very reliable and easy to manage."
"The product is well-rounded and has been effective in meeting our needs."
"The newer servers are more energy-efficient compared to older ones."
"Technical support is very good."
"I like the reliability and ease of swapping out failed equipment. It is very easy to replace power supplies and drives."
"Using PowerEdge helped to reduce unplanned production downtime by 20% to 25%."
"The robustness of the hardware itself is valuable. We have had PowerEdge servers running even after they were out of their warranty timeline. For example, about four or five years ago, we updated the virtualization platform. One of the servers that we had on that platform was ten years old. These servers have a lot of durability. You can see that they are well-made."
"The ease of installation is valuable. The physical side of installation is quite intuitive and has got better by leaps and bounds. The hardware has always been fantastic, and it has always been reliable."
"I can have what they call multi-tenancy, meaning that I can have multiple tenants within the same server."
"We value the stability and technology capability of this solution the most. It is very stable, and the processor technology of IBM is very good. When you have a CIO and you are dealing with C-level every day, you can, without any doubt, support the core banking or critical applications with this solution."
"The backups work great, data recovery works great."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"The best features of the solution are its robustness and service level."
"Power Systems' best features include its user-friendliness and self-checking/self-healing abilities."
"Additionally, the processing power is far superior, especially with the RSA feature for reliability, serviceability, and availability."
"Active Memory Expansion allows you to compress your memory on the run time to allow you to have less physical memory available, but provision more memory to your partitions, as everything will be compressed on the fly."
 

Cons

"The BIOS interface could be improved; it is very poor. PowerEdge is very good overall, but if you compare the BIOS interface with HPE, it is not very good."
"There are new FPGA cards available on the market but they are not in the portfolio."
"The solution could still use some more analytics."
"The solution could improve by making the warranty policy better, which is a little bit complex because our local service partner Smart Technologies has long delays. Whenever we open any case for any customer, it takes more than five days. If we could handle it by ourselves, we could have the issue solved in one day. They should work on a way to fix these delays."
"The performance could be a bit better."
"Since the start of COVID, there is a shortage of support resources and it is challenging to get queries resolved quickly."
"Considering from a hardware perspective, some areas of concern were network cards on the models we had in our organization, which were fairly inaccessible, so we had to remove the whole motherboard and, basically, the whole system to get rid of or swap a network card."
"The T150 is a little bit bulky for what it is. I think if they created a T150 version with small form-factor drives, that would be an ideal solution. Currently, it is a tower box and it has quite a big footprint..."
"I would like to see the scaling model improved so it's not just either tiny or huge."
"Everyone likes speed. Not that speed has been an issue up until now but you can never be too fast."
"If you take advantage of some of these real advanced features, for oversubscribing as an example, it's not supported on Linux on Power. So that stops us, in particular, from going that way."
"The pricing is high."
"The price has room for improvement."
"I know lab services does a lot of work but systems, if they could include some kind of lab services and bundling of services to get you to the greatest and latest feature at the already included cost"
"The number of times IBM refreshes its operating system appears to be very slow."
"One of the features that we would like, and I think they are also adapting to the latest trends in the market, is to make it more open, more flexible... With VMware, anybody can create a virtual machine without any knowledge of the server side. But with AIX it's a bit difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is great; very competitive. That's the reason we bought hundreds of them."
"We have a strong agreement in place with our parent company, that typically ensures favorable pricing terms for us, although occasionally we may need to negotiate with Dell representatives for further discounts to provide competitive pricing to our customers."
"The price of this solution is reasonable. It's very comparable to similar solutions."
"I don't know about the product's licensing part. Price-wise, it is an okay product. I believe that the cheaper the better, but I think that the product's price is okay."
"I'd like them to be cheaper, but that's not the world we live in and that's not where the pound is at."
"The price of Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"I don't see any issues with respect to licensing. It's power-efficient, so it's beneficial to the customers price-wise. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."
"It's not a very expensive solution."
"IBM Power Systems is a really expensive product."
"It is designed for a large workload, as opposed to a small workload. For our circumstances, and even as an independent, I can't buy a Power system to experiment on. It can't happen. You cannot buy them."
"There is a yearly licensing cost, and it's an expensive solution."
"The price of IBM Power Systems is expensive and could improve."
"The price of the solution depends upon the configuration part of it. Based on what configuration you want to go for it, there is a range like IBM Power Systems POWER9 and IBM Power Systems Power10."
"The additional software costs are high."
"Price-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten."
"I give the cost a one out of ten."
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Answers from the Community

LS
Jan 16, 2022
Jan 16, 2022
IBM Power Systems vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Server IBM Power Systems is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) system that contains 8 threads or over per core. This processor performs super-fast due to the RISC algorithm technology than any other Intel-based hardware (e.g., Dell, HPE, Cisco). In Intel, there are only 2 or 4 threads per core and it performs according to CISC (Complex Instructi...
2 out of 3 answers
SR
Aug 16, 2021
IBM Power Systems vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Server IBM Power Systems is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) system that contains 8 threads or over per core. This processor performs super-fast due to the RISC algorithm technology than any other Intel-based hardware (e.g., Dell, HPE, Cisco).  In Intel, there are only 2 or 4 threads per core and it performs according to CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer). IBM Power system is a sustainable, reliable and obviously costly solution compared to any other Intel-based solution.  Generally, IBM Power system is used in mission-critical systems. 
Nicolae - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 3, 2022
IBM Power comes with virtualization integrated (PowerVM), highly optimized (practically with no performance impact) - no need for VMWare, HyperV etc.  For database it is the recomended platform - even is Hana, Oracle (best combination with AIX) or DB2 (DB2 for me is the most autonomous database that you can have).  The downside of IBM Power could be the lack of support for Windows and the initial cost. 
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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....
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?
The world market for CPUs is excited. We have new ideas popping up left and right like new accelerator cards because there are GPUs. Dell is already working with Kalray, for example, that builds ac...
What do you like most about IBM Power Systems?
IBM Power Systems provides very good performance and stability compared to other brands or processors.
What needs improvement with IBM Power Systems?
IBM should provide a platform where users can learn about the storage and security of IBM Power Systems.
What is your primary use case for IBM Power Systems?
In my company, we use the system for the data center and our IBM Cloud Pak System.
 

Also Known As

PowerEdge R
IBM OpenPOWER LC
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
Cipher
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs. IBM Power Systems and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.