Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

Dell PowerEdge R-Series serves as the university's central research engine. We process heavy databases for biological data, fisheries analysis, and spatial mapping, such as coordinates and biomass density studies in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. Engineering departments also run complex mathematical optimization models here. Additionally, biotechnology projects leverage its RAM and CPU for bioprocess simulations and genetic crop regulation models, drastically reducing calculation times without system freezing

Dell PowerEdge R-Series brought massive IT efficiency, nearly eliminating downtime. Academically, it removed hardware bottlenecks, cutting genetic and spatial simulation times by 70%. It improved energy efficiency—processing triple the data with stable power use—and offered agile virtualization for changing research demands. Furthermore, its robust GPU support enabled fast AI and machine learning training, perfectly aligning with our carbon footprint and sustainability goals.

Our top three features are: 1) Massive RAM and processing scalability, crucial for rapidly growing biological databases. 2) The iDRAC system, which transformed my IT routine. It enables complete remote management, real-time health diagnostics, and proactive maintenance, eliminating time-consuming trips to the server room. 3) Hardware redundancy, like dual power supplies. This reliability ensures multi-day research simulations never crash mid-process due to minor electrical faults.

Areas for improvement include iDRAC licensing and mass update management. Advanced iDRAC automation requires enterprise licenses, which strains strict university budgets. Dell offering flexible educational pricing or adding more features to the base license would help. Also, the interface for mass firmware/BIOS updates is tedious, requiring careful manual planning to avoid interrupting long research simulations. A more intuitive group update tool would make maintenance perfect.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers at the university for a little more than two years. We implemented them specifically when our biological and spatial research databases started to grow too much and we needed much more processing capacity so as not to delay the work.

I consider Dell PowerEdge R-Series to be an extremely stable solution for the university's current needs.

I would rate the scalability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as excellent. It has been one of the features that has helped us the most at the university, and as the biotechnology research projects, for example, grow and demand more resources, the servers have allowed us to scale vertically without complications.

Our experience with Dell's customer support has been positive overall. We have had to contact them on some occasions, mainly to validate some preventive diagnostics of components and to quickly manage the warranty of a part before a major failure occurred. The attention received from the technicians has been professional and efficient.

Previously we used rack servers from another brand, mid-range models from years ago before Dell PowerEdge R-Series. The main reason we decided to switch to Dell PowerEdge R-Series was the severe bottleneck we were facing with the growth of research projects. Those previous systems no longer supported the massive RAM expansion required by our new spatial databases and biotechnology models. They also lacked a truly robust remote management system like iDRAC, which forced my team to make constant trips to the site for any minor check. To top it off, their thermal and energy efficiency was very low, which greatly increased our maintenance costs. Dell PowerEdge R-Series quickly solved these limitations.

The initial setup was quite straightforward and efficient. Thanks to tools like iDRAC, deployment and integration into the university's data center went smoothly internally without needing external consulting.

No, we did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. The entire setup and integration process was handled internally by our university's IT team using Dell's built-in management tools

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has helped reduce the total cost of ownership for the university. The total cost of ownership has been considerably reduced if we look at it over the equipment's life cycle. On one hand, we have the reduction in electricity and cooling bills that I mentioned before, plus the ten to fifteen hours per week that my systems team saves thanks to iDRAC remote management. All that technical time saved is money for the university. The biggest impact is in hardware consolidation. Before, to support these new AI and spatial mapping workloads, we probably would have had to buy around four dedicated lower-capacity servers. By consolidating everything on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, thanks to its high density and virtualization, we estimate savings of approximately thirty to thirty-five percent in acquisition costs, third-party licensing, and maintenance projected over five years. This is a huge relief for the university's budget.

We have seen a clear return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. The first is in the operational and staffing side. Although we didn't have to reduce headcount, the savings of between ten and fifteen hours per week that my systems team has achieved thanks to iDRAC remote management has allowed us to reassign that time to strategic network modernization projects instead of spending it firefighting or doing physical checks at the site. Second is research productivity. By reducing scientific simulations and AI models from multiple days to less than twelve hours, researchers can deliver their projects on time and research grants or funds are used much more efficiently. Financially, by consolidating multiple heavy workloads on these servers instead of buying a fleet of smaller systems, we estimate an overall global savings of about thirty percent in costs projected over five years. The return on investment has been more than evident for the university.

In our experience, the pricing, implementation costs, and licensing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series have been quite reasonable. The initial investment in Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers represents a significant cost because this is enterprise-level hardware, but it is fully justified by the durability, performance, and TCO reduction mentioned throughout its life cycle. In terms of implementation, costs have been quite reasonable because these are systems with intuitive provisioning tools and advanced remote management, and we have not had to incur high external consulting expenses. We have handled the deployment directly with the internal team. However, the area where we have had the most friction in costs is licensing. As I mentioned before, the advanced functions of the iDRAC system or certain enterprise automation capabilities often come tied to a higher license tier, and for a public university with strict budgets these additional license costs sometimes complicate financial planning a bit. Apart from that, the overall balance between cost, price, and implementation has been positive.

Before choosing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we evaluated other options. Before we were going to go with rack systems from brands like Hewlett Packard or Lenovo. In fact, we closely analyzed equivalent HP ProLiant series and compared technical specifications, processing density, and cost quotes with their equivalent product line.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series overall as a nine out of ten. It is an excellent system, extremely robust, and it has given us great results in data processing. The details about licensing costs and the mass update interface are the only things that affect the score.

I gave Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine and not a ten mainly because of the two improvement points I mentioned. If I evaluated only the hardware and raw power for the projects and all that, I would give it a ten. But as an IT administrator, I have to evaluate the overall solution. The fact that the licensing scheme is somewhat rigid and expensive to access all iDRAC functions in the education sector, plus the fact that the mass firmware update tool requires a lot of manual work on our part, does make me deduct one point. If Dell made these costs more flexible for universities and improved that interface, it would be a definite ten.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are deployed entirely on our own premises. Since this is physical hardware that gives us the processing power for biological and spatial analyses, we need to have them physically in our own university site to guarantee direct access and no latency issues. These systems operate within an environment that we consider hybrid. Although the heavy processing and databases live locally on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, all that information is later connected and backed up to the Azure public cloud for long-term storage.

We use Microsoft Azure as our only public cloud provider for backup and storage. The main reason is that it integrates very natively and smoothly with our Dell-backed ecosystems. All the heavy information from the spatial and biological analyses processed on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers is first backed up locally and then we send the historical or long-term retention data to Microsoft Azure. This entire hybrid infrastructure has worked perfectly for us.

My specific role in the use and management of Dell PowerEdge R-Series within the university is to serve as the university's information technology administrator. That means I am directly responsible for planning, deploying, maintaining, and ensuring the operation of the institution's entire technological infrastructure. Specifically regarding the management of Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, my work covers everything from the initial hardware configuration and resource provisioning for virtualization for the research departments, to proactive health monitoring of the system through iDRAC, management of backup policies to our Azure cloud, and supervision of firmware updates to ensure that scientific simulations and AI projects never stop due to technical failures.

If I had to give advice to other organizations, especially educational institutions or research centers considering implementing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, it would be to plan the initial sizing very well and to thoroughly analyze the licensing scheme they are going to acquire. On the technical side, do not skimp on the base memory and processing capacity thinking you will upgrade it later, because workloads and modeling grow very quickly. Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers have tremendous scalability, but starting with a good resource cushion will make your life much easier. On the administrative side, my main recommendation is to review in detail with your Dell provider the enterprise licensing options, especially if you can apply for academic packages or if you want to unlock iDRAC features from day one. My overall rating for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers serve as the foundation for our compute needs, running servers, workloads, and Kubernetes clusters. Our video servers and SQL servers are all based on one of those servers running in the back end, performing compute operations and understanding. Hosting our GPUs within the R-Series is a key factor in what we do.

We have been able to use Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers to run GPU nodes for the last three to four years. They were a key part of us starting to leverage AI in our growing system, understanding how to maintain the crops, understanding what is going on, and performing backend updates to the large language models before pushing out the inferencing to the end. This is where we perform this work on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers have really helped us reduce unplanned production downtime. It is always hard to gauge this now because our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are very often inside of a cluster, so we do not have one server going down that will affect us. This is where ProSupport services come in, where they will get us a part in four hours to get us back going and try to avoid that N minus 2 scenario where we lose a second device, which really can usually cause problems.

Regarding energy consumption with the new Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, it is a big topic for us. When we are running a 250-acre greenhouse with about 400,000 lights on, the power for one server does not really affect it as much. We do really monitor what we use and want to use as little as we can, but it makes it a little less of a spotlight for us as a company. We enjoy the built-in features of how it uses less energy and how it optimizes things, but it does not really hit our bottom line as quick.

One feature of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I love, and it has improved generation over generation, is the iDRAC feature. Being able to get back into the server, control it, and then with them linking up to the AI Ops, allowing me to see real-life telemetry of what is going on and understand what is going on in a single pane of glass has made it so much easier for us to understand. These features benefit us because we are a small IT team. Now with our expansion into the Dell Private Cloud, it has allowed us to not even have to interface with the iDRAC but allow the software to do the work. It is almost letting AI deploy a VxRail cluster, a vSphere cluster, ESX hosts, or Red Hat OpenShift through a click, and it goes in the back end and deploys it. Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are such a multi-function tool for us and they have such a great API to allow us to do so many functions that it makes it easy to work with.

The features I love and I struggle with each day still is the Bluetooth feature once in a while to get it working on my phone. I still struggle with that each day. I think sometimes my team teases me that I am just a little more old school. I prefer to just plug into the iDRAC, find the IP, and get to it. But I think for me, it is just a little bit of a generational thing now.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers have been part of our operations for almost thirteen years.

The overall flexibility of our operations has always been very high with using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers. We have multiple locations and multiple server racks across these locations. There is always the right size to fit our needs, anything from a two to four unit sized server rack, Dell PowerEdge R-Series server to something very simple in the 200 range to help us do what we need to do. We do not need to rely on a one-size-fits-all approach. We go and say, 'This is what workload we want to put on it. This is how much we need.' We customize that server to work in that location. And at the end of the day, it is that commonality that we are working with the same generational server across our platform.

I would evaluate the customer service and the technical support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers as amazing. I have always been able to call up and ask, 'How do I do this? What do we need to fix? I have got this weird error.' The joy of when you get the ProSupport Plus for those servers is that they are there to help you.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we were using an HP ProLiant and basically even just workstations doing the work of what should be a server load. This was also part of the Nature Fresh growth pattern of growing from being a small company to being an enterprise company. We had to leave that small portfolio of thinking it was just as cheap to get a workstation to do the load of what a server should do. The benefits we started to see from the reliance and the availability of a server-grade system made it so much stronger for us.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers. I can go back in history of our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers to one of the first ones we got almost ten years ago, an R410. We were facing SQL issues that we could not explain. We switched everything over to an R410, and we also took leverage of every bit of a 410 at the time. We went to solid state and did all those types of things and we knocked our SQL time from being three to four hours to do a backup down to minutes to the point where now it became something we did not have to shut down our production to do a backup. We could just instantaneously do it. These types of returns we see each day as we continue to grow. And even now, when we look at how we expand, we are able to condense our current structure from generation to generation where a seven-node cluster in one place is now reduced down to three nodes. This really helps the space inside the rack and helps return on investment, and that goes right back into the energy savings because we are only having to power three servers instead of seven.

My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that the licensing is basically your ProSupport, things of that nature. It has always been easy for us. It is always a little hard to wrap your head around which processor is in there and whether to go Intel or AMD, but it all works so well. Our costing model is about the same. The new change to it again is the Dell Private Cloud because that is now an extension on each node. A Dell PowerEdge R-Series node is one license for that, but it is still a simple model.

Other solutions I considered before selecting Dell PowerEdge R-Series were HP and IBM. It came down to being one single vendor for our switches and for the core components out there. This makes that support call so much easier. It makes that support time so much easier when you know that you have got one large team working to fix your issue, instead of having two different teams trying to figure out who is at fault. It is more of now, how do we fix that problem.

My impressions of Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers' impact on our company's sustainability goals are that one of our sustainability goals is recycled materials, reusing of components, and e-waste reduction. We use Dell's recycled services to come pick up the equipment once they are done. That is what matches a lot of our goals, as we have recycling containers and recycling packages. We make sure that we try to be friendly to our environment. We recycle our water. All of that leads into that same concept of how do you take what you have and make the most benefit of the resources available. I would rate this review overall with a score of ten out of ten.

Private Cloud

Other

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is mainly used as a virtualization host, so all the other virtual machines run on it, except for storage.

My main client's Dell PowerEdge R-Series has only one, so we end up without many backups. We also don't have clusters, but the virtualization host has worked well.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is implemented in one of our clients' locations. We don't have Dell PowerEdge R-Series in our own environment yet, but I have two clients that use it. The performance is as expected.

Regarding modularity and ease of maintenance, it was crucial that Dell PowerEdge R-Series is modular because even without specialist maintenance experience, we didn't have any issues. We were able to take it out of the rack, replace the power supply, replace a fan, and add memory with no difficulty. It functioned almost like a desktop computer, which had a big impact since the action was done after working hours, and we couldn't take too long.

The best feature that Dell PowerEdge R-Series offers in my experience is its modularity, which has helped the most because our biggest client's server is a bit older, and we've already had to replace fans, which was super easy, upgrade the memory, and we even replaced the entire motherboard. Everything went very smoothly, precisely because of the way Dell PowerEdge R-Series is built.

Regarding the Artificial Intelligence features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, it is working well. Compared mainly with market LLMs, it is much better and it works. We've been using it, and it has worked.

Regarding the AI features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we have to validate everything. We evaluate it by taking it and comparing it with market applications. Since we're also Microsoft partners, we use Copilot for Business, and that's how we evaluate it. We've already been doing this for about a year, and it has always proved quite efficient.

What I think is still lacking is the amount of expansion for USB access, because there in the rack, more than one of my clients has more than one piece of equipment that needs to have some USB plugged in all the time.

The crucial point with the R line is the USB ports issue. Dell PowerEdge R-Series works well, and I just miss that amount of USB connectivity.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for six years, since our main customer still uses an old R720 to this day. We also had experiences with the T line, but most of our customers use the R line.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is certainly stable in my experience.

The scalability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is great. This overlaps with what I said about modularity, as it is completely scalable, both in terms of overclocking—we can go beyond stock to push it to the limit—and in terms of other devices we can add and expand Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

The customer support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is great. We've always been well served. I would rate customer support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series a 10. Dell's customer support is excellent.

In both cases, there was a client that already used Dell before, also in the R line, Dell PowerEdge, and the other used IBM. In both cases, they were outdated devices only serving as virtualization hosts, but now they also handle AI much better.

Regarding return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we don't have a metric because in both clients we didn't have the previous metric to use as a reference. We haven't had any complaints or remarks. They all work as expected and they deliver more than the previous solutions.

Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we're not very involved with pricing. That's the client's decision, and it's up to us to explain and highlight to the client what they're paying for.

Before choosing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we didn't evaluate other options because the options were always in the R line. In both cases, the equipment is allocated in a rack.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine on a scale from 1 to 10 since I have that criticism about the USB, it would be inconsistent for me to give it a 10.

I give Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine because it's a robust device, a reliable device, and regarding maintenance, it's easy to access and easy to understand.

My advice for others who are considering using Dell PowerEdge R-Series is to analyze very carefully what you need because Dell PowerEdge R-Series and its versions will probably have what you need.

On-premises

Dell PowerEdge R-Series supports our entire virtualization environment. VMware sits on top of PowerEdge, and we use VSAN within that. We also have a few application servers that sit separately on PowerEdge as well.

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I prefer the most include out-of-band support, which has improved significantly. iDRAC is an amazing product that has become more full-featured over time. Full access to pre-OS configuration is a great feature. Additionally, the simplicity of the PowerEdge platform physically makes it easy to take apart. Everything is very modular and nicely designed.

The benefits of these features for my company include that Dell PowerEdge R-Series is a solid compute platform. Nothing ever fails at this point very much. Occasionally a drive will fail, but that is easily resolved. Memory will fail and is easily resolved. We really have not had any issues that we experienced previously with other devices where we hit bottlenecks. We still have not seen that. Everything works amazingly. If there are issues, they are usually at the guest OS level and not the Dell PowerEdge R-Series devices themselves.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped to reduce unplanned production downtime significantly. Before we went with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I was not there, but I know that we were having major issues with our primary EMR platform because the physical servers we were using previously were underpowered for that use. As soon as we went to Dell PowerEdge R-Series, those issues resolved. That was huge for us.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved by adding more lights on the front. It would be awesome to get more than just the Dell logo lit up. I would appreciate seeing everything lit up. Just keep improving CPU and RAM and SSDs, and keep improving the general performance. I think that is all we really need. Stability has already reached a point where we do not need to worry about it the way we used to.

In my current role, for the four years I have been there, we have always had Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers set up.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has affected the overall flexibility of our operations and business positively. We are not hitting those bottlenecks anymore. CPU and RAM bottlenecks are nonexistent now, and we have had the same Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for about four or five years. We still do not see anything even with expansion and more VMs that are installed. Performance is still great. We have had some of our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, since storage is local, fill up to past 90 percent before and we still have not seen any degradation in performance, which is amazing.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support specifically for Dell PowerEdge R-Series as amazing. In the past, Dell was known for not having great support, but in the past few years they have been incredibly impressive. I have told Dell this directly because I have been so impressed with how good they are and how fast they get back to you. We have also had to use them for upgrades and we have had to delay upgrades for weeks at a time and there have never been any complaints or closed tickets. They have kept the tickets open the whole time. I have been largely very impressed with Dell's support and they are near the top of my list of good vendors with good support.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we were using another solution that I believe was not Dell. I was not there for that. The fact that our EMR was constantly crashing and we saw bottlenecks in both CPU and RAM made a change necessary. We went with Dell because Dell is a trusted company and it ended up being the right decision.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We used to have constantly crashing applications and servers within our previous devices. Now that Dell PowerEdge R-Series has been implemented, we do not see that same degradation in service and our EMR no longer crashes, which is the most important thing. It used to happen a lot and then it went down to nearly nothing.

My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing with Dell has been fairly simple. There are times where we went directly through Dell, and there are times where we went through partners. Either way, it usually goes pretty smoothly. I do not know exactly what licenses we got, but the purchase process and the deployment process have always been smooth. Dell or partners always have someone to help you deploy the actual software or the actual hardware, so it has always been pretty simple.

I was not around during the evaluation process, so I do not know what other solutions were considered before selecting Dell PowerEdge R-Series. I do not have details on that.

We do not currently have any AI workloads running on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers. Nothing yet. The plan is there. We have the GPUs ready to go. The GPUs are there and they are installed. We just have no localized AI yet.

Regarding whether using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce our total cost of ownership or TCO, that is a management question. I cannot answer that.

I assess the new Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for energy consumption as much better compared to previous devices that we had hypervisors on. There is much less power usage now. I can see through the UPS devices that they are connected to that there is not as much power consumption as there used to be in the past.

My impressions of Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers' impact on our company's sustainability goals are uncertain. I do not work in philanthropy, so I do not have strong opinions on that.

Downtime was reduced significantly. From what I have heard, downtime was probably at about 15 percent of total business hours, ranging from 10 percent to 15 percent of total business hours. It has dropped down to 0.05 percent. That is quite an improvement.

I would advise other companies considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series to go for it. Dell is a great company. Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are great. They are great for hypervisors as we use them for virtualization. It is a solid product. Things do not fail, which is what you want in any business. My overall rating for this product is 9 out of 10.

On-premises

Other

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is used for virtualized general infrastructure for the most part.

The best features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate the most are fairly consistent performance, pretty good support, sometimes fair pricing, and generally good availability of different configurations to meet business needs.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series generally helps reduce unplanned production downtime due to their reliability.

In Dell PowerEdge R-Series, the areas with room for improvement are pricing because costs have increased significantly for what they offer. The pricing should decrease as component costs drop, especially with current issues regarding memory and sometimes CPU availability. Additionally, the supply chain should be much better for a Tier 1 OEM like Dell.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for approximately 20 years.

Regarding stability, for the most part, we do not have downtime or glitches. Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are fairly reliable, though I have recently experienced a glitch when I rebooted a server. From 1 to 10, I would rate the stability of most of them at eight because we own 14th generations and 17th generations, with the 17th generation being very new.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable as any other server for our business. From 1 to 10, I would rate scalability at seven or eight.

From 1 to 10, I would usually rate the technical support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series at least an eight or a nine.

Positive

The deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series was fairly straightforward.

Overall, I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. They are reliable, so I am getting good use out of them.

When comparing Dell PowerEdge R-Series with other solutions or vendors such as HPE, Cisco, Huawei, and IBM, I have HPs as well, but Dell's portfolio is perhaps a little more broad and easier to understand. Even Dell has many options, which is probably too many and confuses people, making the process much more complex than it needs to be.

The workloads I currently run on Dell PowerEdge servers are almost all virtualized with VMware.

I use AI daily with Dell PowerEdge R-Series in a special Google DoD FedRAMP environment.

Approximately 200 humans and 1,000 IPs, meaning 1,000 devices, use the solution.

The solution requires maintenance through updates and patching. I perform firmware and BIOS updates and housekeeping tasks once every 12 to 24 months, which means the machine has some downtime. Another concern is support, which typically comes in one, two, or three-year contracts that must be renewed, and the costs are sometimes much higher than they should be.

Regarding energy consumption assessment for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, they used to not be great, but in the last few years, they have become much more efficient. I believe they run the fans at different speeds at different times, maximizing power usage for efficiency in 2026.

I do not know if the solution has helped reduce my total cost of ownership, as I do not have anything to compare it against.

My advice for others looking to implement Dell PowerEdge R-Series is to work with a good reseller that understands all the different configurations and options so that you are well-informed. I rate this solution an 8 overall.

On-premises

Google

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for as long as they have existed, in my opinion, so approximately 20 years. I am involved in working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series by doing system designs for our customers, choosing the systems, and since we also operate the systems in the data center for our customers, I also handle the operations.

My use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are completely mixed, since we come from the publishing sector. Some are publishing systems, image editing systems, image systems, image archiving systems, web servers, and database servers, so really across the entire landscape.

I could not really say offhand which application I find the most valuable. As I said, I have been working with them for a very long time, and system management works very well.

System management works well for us in operations, and that is of course a key point for us. Otherwise, I would not know a single point that I could highlight.

It works so well due to our fairly long experience with it, and even when a new version comes out, we are integrated into it relatively quickly. Integration into third-party systems, monitoring, and other systems is also quite good.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series improves our company by supporting our work and our operations. The company itself does not become better or worse just because I would use another manufacturer. However, I have had very good experiences with Dell systems, and the price-performance ratio has always been great. In that respect, we have been quite satisfied over the years.

I cannot really say how Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved. The range of systems is quite large, from small to large, from one socket to two sockets and four sockets. There has always been a suitable system for us for each use case. The choice of CPUs, RAM configuration, and modifications is very large, partly even a bit too large, because I sometimes get lost in the configuration options, but nothing negative really stands out to me at this point.

In the server environment, it is probably more secondary, but what might actually be a small added value for Dell PowerEdge R-Series would be if there were also a server line that had higher graphics performance out of the box. For topics regarding terminal services, Citrix, and similar applications, I can install appropriate GPU accelerators, but sometimes that is already oversized. If the server itself had more graphics performance and GPU onboard, that would be an absolute added value, as I would have many use cases where I could use that, because the next step, an extra GPU with the licensing that comes with it, is a completely different cost level.

I have been working in this field for 33 years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has always grown well with my company's needs in the past. We also have customer additions and departures, of course, whereby for the additions, relatively quickly relatively large quantities of systems must be procured. That has always worked well so far, and the delivery and the whole handling with Dell was always top-notch. There were no problems.

I would rate the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as very good, with few defects. There is sometimes a defect in a system, especially since we have a large number, but that is really marginal.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series products grow with my needs.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable for the company's long-term plans.

It fits because the portfolio of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is quite large. Even if we now got a relatively small customer who does not have the financial background to run large systems, I would still find something suitable in the Dell portfolio. That is different with some other manufacturers, but here the range is very broad, so that I can actually find the right thing for every use case and every budget.

For a company like mine, smaller in size, Dell PowerEdge R-Series contributes to growth and operational success through customers using more services or new customers joining. It supports our operations, and due to the reliability and good price-performance ratio, it helps, of course, but the company does not grow solely because of that.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service as a nine. The support is good, and of course, we have little contact because we have few problems, but I have only heard positive things from my employees.

Positive

Compared to previous servers from HP, I would say it had a better price-performance ratio back then. However, today I no longer make the comparisons. The manufacturers all use similar components from similar suppliers. For CPUs, it is Intel and AMD, and there are not many alternatives, so the prices overall are probably similar. However, I have always had good experiences with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, so there is no reason to benchmark other manufacturers again and make a general switch, because we also have a large stock of Dell systems.

I used another solution for similar needs many years ago when we had HP systems in parallel with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, which are similar in their series to the Dell systems. However, that was so long ago that I cannot really verify or reference it anymore.

I no longer use those systems simply due to a strategic decision. We also had a small share of Fujitsu systems, and managing three system managements and three patch managements becomes too big for a small or medium-sized company. That means we decided to focus on one manufacturer, and in this case, it was Dell because my experience with the systems and the hardware was better than with the others, and the price-performance ratio was also somewhat better.

I was not involved in the deployment or initial setup of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but I was involved in the sizing and procurement.

I have not seen a return on investment through Dell PowerEdge R-Series that can be measured in any way with data. We have a return on investment, otherwise our business model would not be profitable, but I could not give any exact figures. It can certainly be quantified, but it is not measured in detail. However, I am more the technical part of the whole story. That may be measured in other areas by our controlling, but I actually cannot prove it.

When I think about the pricing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series licensing, I see that the systems have certainly gone up quite a bit in price compared to about ten years ago. The technology behind it justifies the price accordingly. Purchasing a server nowadays is already different, purely financially, than a few years ago, but that may be similar in other areas. Software is also not exactly cheap.

At the moment, there are no AI initiatives in my company, and Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not support AI initiatives in any way. That may come in the future, though, as AI is certainly a topic at our company as well. However, it is purely in the application area and not actively operated by us ourselves. We are still waiting to see in which direction it goes and where use cases arise for our customers.

My company is not very big in terms of employees, as we have 60 employees. Customer base wise, we are at three to four thousand workplaces now.

I would not necessarily say that Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features specifically tailored to the needs of small or medium-sized businesses, but due to the modularity and different series, depending on company size, there is actually something for every need. If only high-end systems were on offer, then I would certainly look for another supplier, because we are more in the mid-range, such as R760 and R770 in various expansion stages. That is our bread-and-butter system. High-end systems, four sockets, or larger configurations are rather rare in our use cases.

I do not use performance indicators or benchmarks to measure Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

I cannot name a specific example where the product has improved my business outcome, as nothing comes to mind right now.

I would rate this review with a rating of nine.

My main use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are virtualization, database, and web applications.

Dell PowerEdge plays a role in my company's AI initiatives as we have started the initiative. We are not fully there yet, but we are learning as we go with all the PowerEdge series. We are still trying to start getting more AI platform for next year.

In my AI initiative, I see Dell PowerEdge R-Series playing a role in the more exploratory phases. Once the data is fed into it, it evolves and learns the data and then tells us how to behave from a scientist point of view and from the user perspective.

The feature of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate the most is the flexibility, the expansions, and the resiliency. These features benefit my company because fewer hardware problems result in more uptime for the users. It helps everyone in a 24/7 operational environment.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved by expanding the slots and local disks. This is the main area for improvement because I have many environments where I need local space, and the slots limit how much I can accomplish.

In my role with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I have been using it for approximately 15 years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as decent, although we did experience some downtime, crashes, or performance issues. The 740 model had some problems, but as we worked with back engineering, they understood the issue. This made it better when we got the 760s and new series, which performed very well.

The problem was mainly CPU related, involving Intel and Dell firmware.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales well with the growing needs of my company. We have hundreds, probably close to 500 or 600 Dell PowerEdge R-Series 760 units, and we can perform vertical and horizontal scaling without issue. It fits right in with our infrastructure.

I would rate customer service and technical support a 10 out of 10 because the technical support is fantastic. When I call them, they are always responsive. They conduct working sessions with me, which is very helpful. Additionally, I have a local presence of Dell representatives on-site, which facilitates things for me.

Positive

Before using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we had an IBM solution, but it was very limited at one percent adoption.

I considered other solutions in my journey to switch. We used to be an HP shop, and then we switched to HP for the V-series and other solutions.

The deployment experience of Dell PowerEdge R-Series was very smooth with no issues. I run it out of the box with a few clicks and it is done.

The biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that we use them longer. Normally, our lifecycle is five years, but sometimes we have extended it up to seven years on the same hardware with no issues. This allows us to take a more long-term approach rather than having to replace hardware every three to five years.

Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I would say it is industry standard. I would not call it super expensive, and Dell is generous with discounting. They help us accommodate what we need, and they are very good about it.

I have evaluated other CPU vendor systems, and AMD was pushing harder in the earlier phases, but it never went anywhere. We pretty much stick with Intel.

The selling point for Intel is that we were accustomed to it. Bringing new solutions into the environment meant migrating everything, including application reliability and performance, which was too much effort. We had to stay with it, and AMD lagged behind in certain aspects.

On-premises

My role in using or managing Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that I'm the team manager for the Windows Server team.

Being the team manager for the Windows Server team usually means I handle mostly administrative tasks, but I try to ensure we have the right tools and technology to provide the best Windows platform for our company.

Although we don't use AI workloads extensively on the Windows platforms with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I haven't observed the benefits in production environments, only in demos and presentations.

When it comes to the features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate most, I find it difficult to single out, but I value that it is solid hardware. We receive good support and have a good team partnership with Dell, so we benefit from excellent support and assistance. The soft values associated with our contract and setup arrangement with Dell are beneficial.

Regarding features such as iDRAC on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I find iDRAC to be excellent. We have three staff members who work with iDRAC, which is very helpful. We are currently heightening the security of that as well. Additionally, some of their software that allows us to obtain information about racks, servers, and components is useful.

Assessing the new Dell PowerEdge R-Series energy consumption, I find that for the larger servers, it might be a challenge because we require more power and cooling for our data centers. This could be problematic because our data center infrastructure has not developed at the same pace as the technology itself.

In terms of what can be improved in Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I cannot identify specific areas. Every year, Dell releases a new model. I think it is a solid product that is very good, reliable, and works effectively. We have used them for approximately five years, but we have servers that we have retained for seven years as well. This might be an environmental factor, in that we keep them longer. However, I don't have specific feedback on improvements since they are performing well as they are, making it difficult to determine if we are missing something.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for approximately five years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is solid and works very reliably. We maintain our image and setup, and the service runs continuously. We patch and reboot the systems, and everything functions properly. We have had these servers for five years. We buy rather than lease the servers, so we maintain them for five years. Sometimes, depending on the system running on the servers, we extend their lifecycle. Dell PowerEdge R-Series demonstrates very solid performance.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service for Dell PowerEdge R-Series as excellent because the team from Dell is very competent, and we receive attention immediately. I would rate it at least a nine.

Before adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we were using another solution, which was HP.

We evaluated our solution options every few years, going to the market to benchmark pricing, licenses, and value.

The main reason for changing to Dell PowerEdge R-Series was the price, as Dell offered a more attractive contract.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership. However, with the current market and AI companies purchasing substantial quantities of hardware, hardware is very expensive today. I'm uncertain if it is cheaper than before; it is probably more expensive. Still, I believe the value is fair. It is a challenging market right now.

Regarding my experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I find the pricing challenging right now. We have a budget for servers, but currently, we only receive half a server for the same price. However, I understand why this is the case because of AI and also due to geopolitical issues or shortages of minerals. The overall market situation explains this change. I think the license is fair, and the pricing is fair as well in this current climate.

I recognize that we probably should consider the impact on sustainability goals. However, today, everything is scaling up with increasing power requirements, and perhaps this doesn't align with environmental considerations. The trend indicates more energy consumption, more power demand, more cooling requirements, and more of everything across the board. I'm uncertain whether these two factors are working together effectively.

On a scale of one to ten for Dell PowerEdge R-Series overall, I would rate it at eight or nine. Because we exclusively use Dell now, it is difficult to comment on other vendors, but I would characterize it as solid. I would give it a nine.

On-premises

I manage a team of solution architects, and we design Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for end user customers. My main use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are virtualization hosts and basic compute.

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate most are reliability, support, and iDRAC.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce unplanned production downtime when designed appropriately. Although all hardware experiences failures occasionally, Dell's 4-hour support enables us to minimize downtime, and with proper design, we can essentially eliminate downtime.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has affected the overall flexibility of our operations and business. With appropriately designed servers, there is flexibility to meet the needs of the business. We design for both planned and unplanned growth, and IT departments are often asked to support new initiatives from other lines of business within the organization. Appropriately designed solutions help deliver whatever the business requires.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce my total cost of ownership by eliminating downtime and being able to support the evolving needs of the business. As workloads evolve to containers or AI, the flexibility in servers to add GPUs or other components has been fantastic.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved in several areas. Moving from 16th generation to 17th generation, there was a drop in some flexibility. When 17th generation Dell PowerEdge first launched, I liked the idea of having two OCP cards available, but we could not mix and match what we needed to fit various designs. At launch, not many PCI Express card options were available. It is fantastic that servers are moving to 100 and 400 Gig Ethernet. However, many small customers do not need 400 Gig Ethernet, and I was unable to add more 25 Gig ports at launch, though I believe this is now possible.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for 20 years.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as fantastic. The 4-hour part dispatch is excellent compared to some competitors that offer next business day support.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, my customers worked with Supermicro, which is very easy to displace because of reliability and support issues. We have customers with Lenovo servers, which I consider one of our biggest competitors, primarily based on cost.

I have seen ROI with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

One example of ROI is our work with AMD, where we are refreshing many older 14th generation Intel servers with 17th generation AMD servers. We are able to fit the same workload on fewer hosts. This reduces footprint, which reduces power and cooling, and it reduces licensing costs. AMD is delivering fantastic improvements in terms of core count and clock speed compared to Intel, so being able to do more with less has been valuable.

My experience with pricing, setup, cost, and licensing over the last six to nine months has been challenging because of AI data centers consuming significant resources. Component availability has been a real challenge. A server today costs probably two to three times the price of the exact same build a year ago. I work with many SLED customers, including city, county, school districts, and universities, and they must submit budgets a year in advance. We submit and work on proposals in September so they can plan for their July 1 budget. Quotes are only good for 14 days, and we are trying to predict costs nine months in advance, which has been a challenge.

The other solutions I considered before Dell PowerEdge R-Series include HPE and Cisco, though Cisco seems to be moving away from servers. Lenovo is moving into the space that Cisco may be evacuating. I consider Lenovo the biggest competitor at this time.

Some of our customers have competitive solutions that are not as reliable or have poor support, making them very easy to replace with a superior Dell PowerEdge R-Series solution.

The benefits I have seen from running AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers include cost advantages compared to running those same workloads in the public cloud.

I assess Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for energy consumption by noting that Dell has power calculators, which allow us to know power requirements before servers ship. We are able to appropriately plan power and cooling requirements for the data center whenever there is a new deployment.

Regarding Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers' impacts on my organization's sustainability goals, this question is probably more applicable in the EU and other places where carbon footprint measurements are being tracked, and I am uncertain if it applies to the customer segment that I primarily focus in.

I give this review a rating of 10.

On-premises

Other

My company's use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series include virtualization, backup, and administrative tasks, such as management and patch management.

For small or medium-sized companies, VX-Rail, which is based on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, has definitely contributed to growth and business success. We have been able to use significantly more storage, the systems became much faster, and thanks to redundancies, downtimes have dropped to zero. We haven't had any major IT outages for six years now thanks to Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series definitely has features specifically tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. iDRAC helps the local administrator monitor the system, temperatures, system status, and similar metrics. It reports to different systems, and the adaptability of the system and its manageability is very good.

The feature I consider the most valuable about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is iDRAC, which is a very important system for remote management, allowing me to control, monitor, and manage the server. Apart from that, the product quality is enormous, and failures are virtually non-existent. Support services from Dell are very good, and it's consistently positive. It's basically always a well-rounded package.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has improved my company, even though it's difficult to measure whether there was an improvement since we define our workloads ourselves. Downtimes are minimized, even though none have occurred so far, but when they do, they are very short thanks to the appropriate support services. I can always rely on the systems; they're always available, and in terms of support, I always quickly reach someone who can help me further without any problems.

Nothing comes to mind spontaneously about what could be improved with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

I actually find nothing currently missing in this area because you can configure the servers accordingly when ordering, and you get everything you need in that sense.

There's not much about the support that I could still improve; there was this one isolated case where I had an issue and they couldn't really help me, but otherwise, I think overall, I'm very satisfied. The nine is just to ensure they don't forget to keep making an effort; I couldn't name anything specific.

I find nothing specific that needs to be improved, but I agree there is still room for improvement.

I have been working in this field for twenty-two years, regardless of the position I currently have.

Regarding reliability and stability, I can confirm that I don't experience crashes, outages, or performance issues. Sure, things can fail, and anything can break. That's why, as an IT administrator, I build in redundancies. Hardware failures have not led to any work stoppage, so I have full satisfaction in this area.

Dell products grow with the needs of the company and are scalable for our long-term plans. The projects we've done with Dell so far are always set up to provide scalability. In those projects, they look at the current workload to size the products sensibly and ensure there are options available for further growth, whether that's through adding more hard drives, expanding network cards, or adding graphics cards for other workloads—all are possible.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series grows with the needs of the company, and I have expanded it at some point.

The expansion works perfectly, and it was problem-free.

Support services from Dell are very good, and it's consistently positive.

I always quickly reach someone who can help me further without any problems.

Compared to the previous servers, the support services were worse back then. Dell servers are naturally more expensive because the support is included in the price, but you know what you're getting for it.

I would rate Dell's support in general as a nine or ten.

That's also the rating for Dell PowerEdge R-Series support in this case.

Positive

What distinguishes Dell PowerEdge R-Series from other servers is my previous experience with servers from a small German distributor called ICO, which were more or less self-built and couldn't really compete with Dell in terms of quality and support services. I haven't really had servers from other major players like HP or Lenovo in my hands so far.

I had another solution before from the German manufacturer ICO, somewhere in southern Germany, who supplied us with servers.

I switched because it was a project to move into virtualization; we hadn't used that before. That was around 2010 or 2012, and the existing provider couldn't offer us anything good there, so together with Dell, we set up a good project to create a virtualization environment.

Our system infrastructure used to be set up on individual servers, referred to as terminal servers for our employees. Thanks to the VX-Rail series, we were able to make that fully redundant. It was at least as performant, if not faster, and we have gained 100% fail-safety. Before, outages were factored in—if there had been a failure, we would have had a full day of downtime, which we no longer need to plan for.

I was involved in the deployment and setup as well.

I find it very difficult to quantify whether I have seen a return on investment by using the new Dell servers compared to before.

However, from my gut feeling, I can definitely say it has been worth it financially to switch. Through process optimization, faster workloads, functions, and scalability, we have definitely gained, and we didn't have to buy additional individual servers—we could simply scale up within the infrastructure without having to throw a lot more money at it.

It's difficult to estimate how long it took until that return on investment, time to value, was reached. For what we bought last year, it will definitely still take some time; I think it will take about two to three years until the full ROI should be reached.

I am very satisfied with the pricing since I order directly from Dell itself and not through a system integrator, placing me in a very attractive price range for the servers. Of course, a lower price is nice, but it's not something I really need to focus on.

I would say the pricing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is fair; you're not being ripped off. Licensing is always a bit of an issue when it comes to third-party vendors. For example, VMware at Broadcom was a big topic in IT last year due to the enormous price increases, and we paid four times the price for licenses at the end of last year. Otherwise, Microsoft is priced normally, where you usually still get a special offer to save another 100 euros, but in a complete project, that usually doesn't make a big difference.

I did consider other solutions before deciding on Dell and obtained other quotes.

What stood out to me with the others is that all the big manufacturers are comparable in that sense; they may differ in software or support services. From my experience in the small-business space, I can say that Dell is actually the best in terms of support, followed by HP, and only behind that comes Lenovo. I've had support cases with all of them in the small-business segment.

We do have AI initiatives in our company, but they are outsourced; we don't have any AI developers or similar in-house, so nothing is running locally on Dell PowerEdge R-Series either.

Everything related to AI is outsourced for us, and we are only end users in that sense.

My company has around one hundred employees.

I can provide a specific example where Dell PowerEdge R-Series has noticeably improved business operations. My overall rating for this review is nine out of ten.

On-premises

Other