Dell PowerEdge M Reviews

We are using Dell PowerEdge M for application and database servers.

The solution is made with high-quality hardware.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge M for approximately seven years.

Dell PowerEdge M is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have had some issues with the vendor's support that we have received. When you open up a support case with Dell they send a partner to assist you and in our experience, they are lacking knowledge about the solution. There are times when you need professional support from the vendor that knows the solution well. 

Here in my country, it has been a problem for Dell to keep offices here. This has been a problem for other vendors too, such as HP.

Dell PowerEdge M price is comparable to other solutions but cheaper than IBM. However, the IBM solution is a higher grade solution whereas Dell PowerEdge M is a medium-level solution.

I have evaluated HPE solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell PowerEdge M an eight out of ten.

I have been using Dell EMC for a number of use cases in my organization. We have made a cluster system and we have it for the LAN and SAN traffic that passes through it.

So far, I haven't applied the LAN traffic and commerce solutions, but I have planned to integrate the solutions. I have not deployed the SAN traffic. I have a one-month plan to deploy the SAN traffic to pass through the LAN switch. This model only has converged solutions. We can do the cluster system so we have converged solutions.

This is the latest generation for Dell EMC Blade System. It has better facilities. I have used the M1000 series and compared to before, the current version is better. 

I have compared Dell EMC to other solutions and have found it to be good. The SAN and LAN traffic, manageability, and upgradability are all good. 

In terms of improvement, it should also offer a hyper-converged option.

Stability is the same compared to the other systems. 

The scalability depends on your needs.

I work in the IT division. Thirty people work under this infrastructure. 

Two or three people are required for maintenance. 

We use all of the blade systems. There are 32 blades. All of the blades run and provide a service. On the other side, there are also 32 blades that are no occupied. We are enrolling the service over there. 

Technical support is really good. I needed to do an upgrade. The network engineer gave us the total possibility to upgrade. They're really good. 

The initial setup is not very complex compared to other models. Other models are more complex. It is better than other systems. We are still in the process of migrating. 

We are upgrading the legacy system to this system. This system is really good as far as the performance, compared to other legacy or older blade models. All of the blade traffic goes through this to a switch. 

For organizations that don't have a blade system, they should start with planning in terms of how to segregate their systems in terms of LAN and SAN systems.

My advice would be to consider that both SAN and LAN traffic are ensured to come together and not separate.

I would rate the Blade Servers a nine out of ten. 

Fitting 40 logical cores and 400GB of RAM into one half-height blade allows me to achieve the density in a cloud environment I aim for. What's more is it handles workloads of 25 VMs and more without any noticeable penalty performance-wise. Despite having 20 physical cores running into two sockets on one board, the vCPU-ready times remain good throughout, while averaging 4 X vCPU for each physical core per blade.

The density achieved by the M630 while maintaining good performance allowed us to cut our hardware footprint by more than half. This makes for a huge cost saving, not only for hardware to maintain and rack space rental costs, but also reduces the required overall hypervisor licensing, which doesn't come cheap.

For a half-height blade, Dell did well with this one, not leaving much room for improvement. The ever-increasing boot time due to ever-increasing POST checks with every new generation makes maintenance tasks somewhat of a headache. That and the occasional chip creep causes one to have to re-seat DIMMs from time to time. Other than that, not much can be said in terms of cons.

If Dell can reduce the chip creep specially on the RAM modules that would e great. This does not occur that often but often enough to try and improve on. Each blade having each own iDRAC instance makes sense for connecting to a single blade on an ad-hoc base but becomes pain when having to access the local console for all blades in a chassis one after the other.

Each connection requires downloading the java aplet from the blade and jumping though a few hoops before it runs. When closing the aplet and one needs to connect to that same blade again the entire process needs to be repeated again. Performing this same task on an IBM blade chassis is a breeze. The CMC provides one with a drop down list listing all slots in the chassis. This allows one switch between local console mode for all blades in the chassis without any repetitive aplet downloads or even having to configure a management IP address for each blade.

Even though this is more of a blade chassis feature than a blade feature Dell would do well in stealing this page from IBM's book.

I have been using it for almost one year.

These units have proven very stable. Even with component failure, in most cases, the unit keeps running, allowing one to migrate workloads off of it first, before attending to any break\fixes.

This solution has proven very scalable.

Technical support generally is acceptable. Having to jump through hoops can sometime be frustrating. Especially when your firmware has to be on the latest version before further assistance will be given. Even though I understand the logic behind it, keeping an entire environment on the latest version is nearly impossible at the rate firmware, drivers and other patches are released.

I have used IBM blade chassis before. The change to Dell at the time was more a financial one - one that I now fully support from a technical perspective.

Setting up the solution is fairly straightforward. If you have any experience on rack-mounts historically, it should all be familiar. Some networking and storage zoning is to be expected as well, though.

The price tag on the M630 can easily be compared to that of most beefy rack mounts out there. And that with very little internal storage. If the aim is raw processing power in a dense and scalable solution with shared storage available, little out there will rival it. Keeping an eye on the exchange rate can make for some huge cost saving, as well, especially when looking to purchase a fully populated 16-blade chassis.

Having used predecessors like the M610 and M620 over the years, refreshing with M630s was the obvious choice.

When increasing the core count of the CPU when requesting a quote, be wary of the big jumps in price going from an 8-core CPU to 10-core or more etc. Dell doesn't give a price per component breakdown on their quotes. Getting two quotes for the same blade where only the CPUs differ will clearly indicate the huge price they associate per core.

Dell PowerEdge M works as a CMC solution. It helps us to manage multiple chassis from a single website.

The firmware updates for the product need improvement.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge M for ten years.

The product is stable.

It is a scalable platform. We have enterprise customers using it.

We have a dedicated team for technical support. However, we contact Dell's support team in case of complicated issues. They provide us with all the essential resources to resolve the queries.

Positive

The product has a user-friendly GUI for configuration. The deployment time depends on the requirements. In case of deploying it on OpenShift or Windows cluster, it takes more time than usual.

The product is neither expensive nor cheap. It is manageable for medium enterprises as well.

It is a good product with an effective monitoring feature. I rate Dell PowerEdge M a ten out of ten.

• Density
• Cost
• Feature set
• Manageability

The low cost and high density of the solution has allowed us to place more compute assets per data center rack and increase our virtual machine count. Our customers rent VMs and compute space from us via a traditional IaaS model. The more VMs and the more compute per rack, the better.

I would like to see a broader range of chassis networking options. Cisco was an option at one time and then not. I am not sure if they are again.

I have used it for 3+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Our only issues with the solution have revolved around firmware interoperability between networking firmware and storage array firmware.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We were using 1U rack mount servers. We switched for density reasons at the time. But now, today, 1U servers are able to accommodate larger amounts of memory and 22-core processors. Additional data center deployments have moved back to 1U designs.

Initial setup was straightforward. The chassis is easy to use and manage. Easy-to-use interfaces allowed for rapid deployment.

Blade chassis can be found on the used market super cheap. If a company already has the M1000e chassis and support under contract, I would advise buying additional chassis on the refurb and second-hand market. If that is not an option, Dell pricing starts high and ends up low after negotiation. They seem to have a large amount of room to move on the initial quoted pricing.

We looked at options from Cisco. Pricing was too high for 1/2 the density.

It’s a solid solution. I recommend it. But in today’s always-on environments and virtual deployments in redundant designs, used hardware is not a bad option. We have quotes on the table for fully populated chassis with 16 blade servers and 4 MXL switches for around $40,000. Compared to about $9k for a single new blade. Given that today’s blades are higher density with newer processors, 1-2 year-old equipment is still a valid solution for our needs.

• Faster deployment
• Efficiency
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Simplified management

It has reduced complexity. Therefore, it is easy to manage by an administrator and we can spend valuable time on other IT issues.

More interconnections with third party equipment and limited I/O selection.

Two years.

No, we have not.

No, we have not.

Good and knowledgeable.

Previously, HPE and IBM solutions, but Dell's are more budget friendly.

It was budget friendly.

You will get your value for your money.

Customer has good experience with Dell products, because they are budget friendly.

Look for a good product and technology to go with. Something reliable and solves problems.