Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

The use cases can vary significantly from one customer to another. Additionally, a single customer may have different sets of requirements for different applications. Consequently, one server can serve multiple applications. Our approach is to design and provide the customer with a solution tailored to their specific needs. We offer a range of servers, from entry-level to mid-range to high-end, depending on the customer's requirements.

We are running virtualized workloads, and some of our workloads are running on SAP HANA. We have other workloads running core ERP systems for other corporates. It varies, and some people use the servers for different applications such as data archiving, virtualization, and more. Dell PowerEdge R-Series is a very good fit there.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is very flexible. We can customize the server entirely to meet the customer's specific needs. This includes tailoring options such as the processor, memory, storage, and networking configurations. Additionally, we offer various types of drives, whether SSDs or traditional hard disks, and we have options for large form factor or small form factor drives, as well as different chassis types. Overall, PowerEdge offers significant flexibility in these areas.

For workload management, we can customize the PowerEdge servers to include GPUs that are specifically designed to handle your AI workloads. When equipped with the right resources, our edge solutions can comfortably manage these demands. The new generation of PowerEdge servers is not only efficient but also performs exceptionally well.

The newer models have incorporated enhanced security features. They have added more robust security measures to the servers themselves. Additionally, Dell excels in the management aspect, which is very beneficial for users.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series industry standard servers have robust options and offer intense security and management features including NVMe support, streamlined remote management, RAID support, and flexible customization from processor to network options. They are robust, tested, and offer scalability options from entry-level to high-end servers.

For the most part, there’s no need for improvement in areas like manageability and security; they’ve covered those quite well. The storage controllers are also very well designed, and the support for NVMe is excellent. Regarding customization, the chassis can be tailored to meet specific user needs. They have addressed many aspects thoroughly. For instance, remote management is well taken care of; I even have an app on my phone that allows me to check the health status of the hardware. Overall, we can monitor and manage servers remotely without any issues. I would say that while Dell keeps up with industry innovations, they’ve addressed nearly all areas effectively.

Dell could improve its coverage a bit. Sometimes, there are firmware updates that need to be addressed. When we log into the iDRAC interface on the server for management, we currently have to manually upload the images for the new firmware upgrade. While the upgrade process itself is straightforward, many customers are often unaware that a firmware upgrade is even necessary. If this process could be automated so that the server can check for available firmware updates on its own, it would be really helpful. The server could send out an alert email indicating that a new firmware upgrade is available, allowing the administrator to decide when to perform the upgrade.

I have been using this solution for more than 20 years.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

When it comes to reducing unplanned downtime, it ultimately boils down to hardware. Dell PowerEdge servers are not fail-proof; from that perspective, hardware remains a potential point of failure. Any hardware can fail, and that’s a reality we have to acknowledge. There's no such thing as a completely fail-proof system. When addressing customer requirements, we design solutions tailored to their needs. If a customer wants to eliminate any single points of failure, our design must incorporate that by using multiple servers instead of relying on just one.

The Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable depending on the model picked—whether entry-level, high-end, or with single to eight socket servers. The offering is tested and secure.

Dell's PowerEdge line has several models, but the one we mostly interact with is the R700 series. This includes models like the R750, R760, R770, and so on. When considering options, if we need to go for higher-end services, we can select models that allow for the addition of more GPUs. Ultimately, our choice depends on the customer's requirements. Some clients are looking for AI workhorses, so we tailor our selection to find the right model that fits their needs.

It's really good. Especially once you subscribe to the pro support, their support is excellent. If they have parts available in the country, they have a very good response time as well. From a technical support perspective, we rarely need assistance, but when we do, it's pretty reliable.

Positive

The deployment is very easy. The deployment is currently on-premises and not in the cloud.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is fairly priced compared to competitors

In my opinion, the biggest competitor is HPE, particularly the DL380. It's one of the best-selling options when it comes to HPE hardware, and I truly love that server. The DL380 from HPE is amazing. In terms of functionality and performance, I would give both HPE and Dell a thumbs up. However, when we compare them, I would argue that HPE is much better than Dell in terms of functionality. The DL380 from HPE is the best-seller, and it competes closely with Dell’s R760 or R770, depending on which generation we are looking at. The R700 series and the DL380 are very strong competitors.

I highly recommend both brands, and I enjoy working with their servers. They offer a lot of flexibility in various aspects, including CPU, memory, storage, and networking. This flexibility is a significant benefit of these servers. I'm not just limiting this to the DL380 or the R700 series; even the R600 series and any PowerEdge or ProLiant server from HPE provide excellent flexibility and reliability. From an uptime perspective, these servers are very robust. We can rely on them, and they truly serve as great workhorses.

Energy consumption in servers is indeed an important factor to consider. However, it is primarily influenced by the processor. One of the key determining factors for energy consumption is the type of processor used in the server. When purchasing a server, the customer's specific requirements dictate which processor model is needed, as well as the specifications of that processor. Furthermore, when we conduct power supply sizing, it is crucial to calculate the appropriate power supply capacity required to support all the devices within the server. This ensures that the server operates efficiently and meets the customer's needs.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our specific use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involves it being the production and DR equipment we utilize for all of our company's VMs.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is its reliability. Once we transitioned to an all-flash storage solution within the servers and the hyper-converged setup, we haven't had a disk failure in six years. Being able to not worry about hardware on a day-to-day basis is a really big thing for me. By using this reliable system, the combination of the servers and the hyper-converged setup saves us a ton of time on the management side. I remember managing a separate SAN for storage that involved creating LUNs and provisioning virtual disks for VMs. Now, it's just all combined, and we don't have to worry about it in our day-to-day.

There have been no complaints among my team regarding Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The accessibility when opening up the chassis could be improved, but since we haven't had to do that since installation, it's not a big deal for us. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way they run as is.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers at this company for years, and personally, overall, it's been twenty plus years through previous jobs.

It hasn't failed us at all, which is a testament to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

For a company of our size, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have supported growth and operational success because they are scalable. We have fluctuations in how many VMs we're running, requiring us to scale up some years and not as much in others. When we needed to scale up in the past, we've been able to add RAM to the chassis to accommodate our needs without issues, and the flexibility for upgrades is nice.

Besides reliability, the other benefit of using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the good customer service we receive when we need something done, which is mostly for planned upgrades. Reflecting on it, the last stack we're about to decommission has been a solid piece of equipment. We've never had to call and say, "This is messed up," or, "There's an issue with this." It has always been scheduled maintenance, which says a lot for a production environment, as we haven't had to call in a trouble ticket for the actual hardware during its entire run. The level of support from Dell has been good; we buy ProSupport Plus for every piece of equipment we have, and Dell provides excellent service through ProSupport Plus to meet our needs.

I didn't consider any other solutions because I've always had a good experience with Dell in my previous companies. When I came to this company, my task was to replace the existing servers with new equipment, which made it pretty much default to go with Dell. I considered a change from HP to Dell because I was familiar with Dell and I appreciated how their servers ran in previous data centers. I thought, if it isn't broken, don't fix it, so I continued using equipment that I liked and was familiar with.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has been fair, and I have no complaints; it's pretty standard lifecycle stuff.

My deployment experience of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has always been good. Whether we do it ourselves or have a managed service come in, deployment is always quick and straightforward with no issues.

The ROI of using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is more on the administration side. It's hard for me to quantify because after we bought it and started using it, it has just been great. There's not a lot of time spent on the day-to-day care and feeding of the appliance, so it has become an afterthought to say, "Oh, you need to check the hardware," which isn't even part of our daily checks since we just trust it to work. By not having to worry about it, I would estimate we save two to four hours a week, depending on what's happening, such as if we need to spin up a new server, which would contribute to more time if done the old way.

Currently, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers don't play a role in our company's AI initiatives since they were purchased before AI became significant, but our next iteration of servers will probably have either software or hardware ready for AI. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do have features that cater to organizations similar to mine, especially the managed services that come with it, which helps since we are limited in resources in-house. It has been helpful to lean on Dell for some managed services when we need outside help. Regarding the hardware equipment itself, it remains a solid piece of equipment that I can rely on. In terms of performance metrics or benchmarks to measure success with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, in the IT world, they often say, "No news is good news." When we upgraded from old HP ProLiant servers to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, a crucial year-end process that used to take two weeks now runs on the PowerEdge stack in just two days, representing a significant performance improvement. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a 10.

We normally do rack for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, and we started buying the VX rails, which is based on the same platform too. 

Most of the time, we're doing this for more compute with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We have a standard workload and usually run mostly bare metal on most of our platform, except when we do the VX rail, which then we use the ESXi VMware for that one. It is all Linux based. 

The nice benefit with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers was that we moved from an Intel platform, started buying more 7525s, more of the AMD-based processors because we can get higher four counts, more dense memory, so that's been our transition.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that it's very common. 

We've seen a lot of reliability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. I just turned off a server that's been on for 11 years. That was a 410 that ran forever. From our point of view, they get good value in what they bought, and it continues to run, so we continue to buy them. It's a very stable, reliable product. The biggest benefit compared to HP is the iDRAC feature. HP has an iLO, but we've had more issues with that and its configuration than we have with the iDRAC and its configuration of the Dell server itself.

We've been impacted by data center issues with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, however, typically not from the server side. We have only lost maybe two power supplies out of about 80 servers. They just run forever.

The easiest thing to improve the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is to have a better road map for us. The challenges we have, because of the two-socket processor, are that there's a refresh cycle about every three years to move to the next product line. 

For us, this gets difficult based on how we do our procurement cycles, as sometimes it's a little too short. We'd prefer to have similar equipment, yet sometimes we end up having multi-generations of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers only due to the fact that we buy in year one and a half to two during the production cycle, and it just gets more complicated for us.

We've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since approximately 2000. I've used many different versions going back to 1750s, R900s. We have been using this platform for at least almost 20 years.

We've seen excellent reliability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. I recently turned off a server that had been running for 11 years. We run the platform, and that was a 410 that ran forever. From our point of view, they get good value in what they bought, and it continues to keep running. We have about 80 servers and have only lost maybe two power supplies. They just run forever. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers definitely fit our needs. 

The only issue with the VX rail was the confusion about the strategy going forward, but that was more related to Broadcom confusing the customers. We run a hyper-converged platform inside our system stack. We weren't really sure what would be supported going forward, but now that we can continue to purchase the rails, they seem to fit our model going forward. It's an easy scalable solution. We can also buy Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and deploy our own ESX and do whatever we want to do.

The customer service for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is great. I'd give them a ten out of ten on that.

Positive

Due to budget constraints in the last couple years when considering Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, the customer we work with specifically brought us some HP equipment, so I ended up with some DL380s. Eventually, they will be replaced when we buy more Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to get them out of our ecosystem.

We do work with other vendors too; however, predominantly, most of our equipment is Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We have Dell on-site support for whatever we need. We haven't had many failures with the platform. We are still running some R930s that are about 10 years old, and we've had zero problems with them. They're 13th generation, while they're currently at 18th generation.

Since we have such a history of deploying these, it's simple for us with intuitive setup. The iDRACs are very simple for us to get things up and running fast, and it fits into how we've built the architecture. The servers have been very standardized for so long. We have both single U and multi U servers based on what the requirement was or what the workload was.

We are not using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for AI initiatives at the moment. We initially looked at doing that, so we bought GPU-ready nodes and used them in a different way. We use those for inference for VDI, however, we've moved away from that based on the way we do compute, and AI doesn't play a factor in what we do. We do more computational-type things.

I'd give Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a rating of ten out of ten. We haven't had any issues with it.

The use cases for implementing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are mainly in warehouses and manufacturing sites to ensure they can effectively utilize IoT devices. 

For instance, a customer has livestock that they brand with barcodes to maintain their health and monitor their consumption, and all these IoT devices are rolling throughout their facilities, gathering data in real-time for assessments. This technology at the edge is very helpful for them.

The features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support AI initiatives by providing compute and storage at the edge, enabling the creation of a lot of real-time information and making that information available to AI capabilities, which helps drive outcomes more quickly. 

From a VAR perspective, the most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are our ability to implement the infrastructure and make it readily available for our customers. 

Customers share with us their experiences, highlighting reliability, ease of use, maintenance, and lifecycle management. They frequently mention that this equipment doesn't break, stating it works and functions reliably.

The ways Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could improve relate more to the educational aspects of how customers can continue to leverage technology, which presents challenges. I do not have a specific set of examples where I think Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could be better or more efficient; it really comes down to ensuring the end customer has a better grasp of what the technology can do for them.

My company is a reseller, so we provide solutions for our customers.

When it comes to scalability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, I find it interesting that, in manufacturing, scalability often doesn't apply much as these are typically small but numerous sites. Thus, scalability means ensuring the collective information derived from all these edge sites can funnel through their main data center rather than within individual sites.

We work with Dell support, and I have a highly competent, certified engineering team that works closely with them, making it a very mutually beneficial situation as we do a lot of hands-on work and code deliveries with our Dell partners. 

I would rate Dell support honestly as having improved; however, there's significant change within the Dell organization that we have felt, impacting the relationships we've built to escalate and address problem scenarios. 

If I rated the support two years ago, it would have been a high eight or maybe a nine; in the last six months, it has likely dropped to a six or seven out of ten due to a lot of churn in Dell, particularly with their sales force and engineering teams.

Neutral

I honestly do not prefer any other competitors of Dell. Having been a customer for 25 years before joining the vendor side, I have experience with HP and Supermicro yet did not prefer those products. My prior issues with Dell equipment were manageable because I knew I could rely on support. Whereas with HP, I did not have that confidence, and Supermicro may seem cheaper but has atrocious lifecycle management and upkeep, which I prefer to avoid.

They do have AI in these cases, and we are actually trying to interject ourselves more into those conversations. A lot of these manufacturers have a conservative mindset regarding technology, focusing on product, shipping, and logistics, which means IT sometimes becomes an afterthought. As a VAR, we try to influence them on leveraging their current data sets to ask how they can use their data to enable business outcomes, and this conversation is now progressing in their understanding of the power of that. AI plays a significant role in predictability concerning their stock, product sets, and inventory shortcomings, particularly in the manufacturing of livestock, regarding health and the ability to harvest that product.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers overall about a nine out of ten as nothing is truly perfect, leaving opportunities for improvement. It's a great solution for my customers, and it's the one we continue to sell.

We are primarily using it for test development environments. We have VMs hosted on them, and we use them to run our internal applications, customer environments, dev setup, common projects, the development environment, and the UAT environment in the service.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty good at handling diverse applications. We get good performance from it. 

We have a lot of VMs on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. On a single server, we have probably hosted 14 or 15 VMs. Out of these, 8 to 10 are continuously running, and four of them are backup VMs, so it can handle a good workload.

For cybersecurity, it is only accessible on the intranet; it is not accessible through the web. We use it for local development purposes, and it is behind our firewall. Its security is strong. We handle a lot of test data for government and confidential customers. It is safe and strong locally. We have not experienced any security issues.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime if we need to replace a hard disk, instead of completely shutting a server, there is a hot swap feature. It is quite good in that aspect. Usually, for any activity, there is a downtime of about 30 minutes. It has saved a lot of time.

We have tried AI workloads for a development environment for a government customer in Singapore. The servers are hosted in Singapore. It is an ML-based engine with AI. It is a government project where data is processed, and we run it on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The benefit of running AI workloads on PowerEdge Servers is that it is easy to allocate memory. The application we are running is memory intensive. It is pretty easy to scale memory and storage.

We have been using these servers for eight years. We have experienced good performance with them. 

Dell PowerEdge's strength is that they have a lot of NIC cards, so we can set up web apps and everything else for development on a single server. We can easily replace hard disks which is quite good.

I have used these servers in a government project along with Nutanix, and there is a security restriction. I do not know if it is from Dell's side or Nutanix's side. From the host, you cannot read the external hard drive data inside a VM. They have a security restriction on it. I understand the security restriction, but there should be a policy where you can do it during the development stages and copy data. After it goes to production, the policy should be implemented, and the port should be closed.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for seven to eight years.

I have not experienced any stability issues. The number of years we have been using these servers shows their reliability. 

For a government project, I went from five nodes to eight nodes, and it was pretty easy to scale up.

We did not directly go to Dell support because we were going through Nutanix. From what I have heard, I would rate Dell support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The setup is easy. Management-wise also, it is pretty easy. We normally remote in from our lab. It is convenient and easy.

We partnered with Nutanix for this government project. They set up the base hardware infrastructure configurations. We built our VM applications on top of that. We had a couple of challenges. Data migration was a big challenge because of the sensitivity of the data. I had to sit inside the data center for twelve hours continuously because we had to take a different approach to transferring data. We could not directly transfer that data from the physical port into a VM. They told us that it was a security restriction that could not be relaxed at all. There should be an option when you migrate large data sets.

I cannot put a number to ROI because it is more of a development environment set up for us, not a production environment. The production environment using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is managed by the government entity itself. We are an application service provider and system integrator. We integrate our custom-built applications or COTS applications into the government infrastructure. Cost-wise, for the physical hardware, we cannot give an estimate because the data we use for development is small in the test environment.

From the fulfillment aspect, the government has a big set of data centers. Most of them have Dell EMC servers. We use the similar, if not the same, hardware to do our development tasks.

We evaluated a Lenovo IBM server seven or eight years ago. We chose Dell PowerEdge because of the storage aspect. We got a better storage and RAM option here, so we moved to Dell.

In terms of our AI journey, we are an IT system integrator. We have built our own IoT platform. We have integrated AI into our IoT platform, and we also have partnered with another PC manufacturer for whom we have been testing hardware devices for the past 20 years or so. We have qualified their AI solutions on their devices.

Everything has a cost, but we have to see the benefits over a longer period of time and its effect on our operations and ultimately customer satisfaction. I do not look at the cost only from a financial perspective; I have to look at it from different angles. This helps ensure that it does not create problems for our customers and that the customer is satisfied. 

I would recommend focusing on performance and reliability rather than just cost.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers very high because we have been able to set up different environments in different VLANs and connect to all of them at the same time. Overall, I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten.

The primary use case for Dell PowerEdge R-Series in my company includes application servers, data storage, and security.

The specific features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I find most valuable are stability and performance. 

We want to ensure that we have 24/7 availability with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, and we have pretty much had that with the servers over the years. 

Performance-wise, for the end-users and the data compute coming through, we are 24/7, so it has to be manufacturing and collecting data constantly. Those two factors from Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers have been very effective over the years.

The Dell PowerEdge R-Series plays a role in my company's AI initiatives, as we're in the very early days of AI. However, the intention is to store data on the new servers, which will then be run by AI models that will be on-premise. We would use the CPU, GPU, or whatever processing capabilities are within Dell PowerEdge R-Series to do the processing of the models.

The stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series are very robust. In the last ten to 15 years of using Dell hardware, I have had a few PDUs and a few hard drives fail, however, in terms of warranty support and replacement, we have never had any actual business downtime. 

In terms of storage, bigger storage capacity for Dell PowerEdge R-Series would be an improvement. There hasn't really been anything that it has not been able to achieve for us, but storage capacity could be increased.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for approximately 15 years.

The stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series are very robust. In the last ten to 15 years of using Dell hardware, I have had a few PDUs and a few hard drives fail, but in terms of warranty support and replacement, we have never had any actual business downtime.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales with the growing needs of my company at the moment, as we are making this new investment. 

We had reached the age limit on the old hardware. We did have a conversation about whether we should just extend the warranty support and continue to use the existing infrastructure, however, the performance would be less than what you can buy today. It is natural that the performance of a machine and its CPUs will deteriorate over time. 

In terms of scalability, the depreciation on the hardware had already been completed from a financial perspective. From a lifecycle perspective, we could have extended it, but personally, I always prefer to have more modern equipment. I made that decision, but scaling was not a constraint.

Dell's relationship with our company, both on a global and a personal level, has been very good over the years. There is a strong relationship between Dell and ourselves, and there have never really been any issues. 

If it purely came down to price, maybe we would consider someone else, however, I value both the service level and the price. In that context, Dell's service levels have been very high and consistent.

Positive

I have considered other vendors other than Dell, and we have used HP previously.

I have seen a return on my investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series historically. We have not seen it yet with this new investment, however, historically, we have. We have used two physical Dell PowerEdge R-Series machines to run 15 servers. You can imagine the return on investment there with two physical devices for 15 servers.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series was fine. It was relatively straightforward. We gave our requirements to Dell and PFH, and they came back with the pricing. Then we readjusted it again with further internal discussions. It was a smooth process.

My advice for someone who is considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series is to take the time to see what business processes you want to use on it and make sure it fits properly. Do this in conjunction with Dell and your internal technical teams to make sure that it's fit for purpose for now and for a five-year window. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series an eight.

That is my primary use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are their worldwide support, which is very accessible along with receiving assistance from professionals and specialists, and the continuous innovations that make it an amazing product in this era. 

I find Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to be a very complex product that is useful in various purposes and across enterprise-level and data center applications, making it very valuable in any area.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers stands out over competitors due to their clean design and strong technology support.

The grade store disks sometimes break, indicating an area for improvement in longevity and reliability. They need to improve the durability of the disks.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since around 2015, which was maybe the first or early generation of PowerEdge servers.

When discussing stability and reliability, we aim for Tier 3, requiring the right solutions and servers, which Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers can help us achieve.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are very scalable and recently announced new HCI called APEX HCI, providing many advantages and flexible options that are understandable for customers.

They have superior customer support compared to Supermicro, which does not cater to enterprise-level needs.

Positive

I have used Supermicro and HP before selecting Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

While I can't recall specific numbers, our company has had discussions about the return on investment from using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. It takes time to realize those benefits.

With over 15 years in this field, I can say that the setup costs, pricing, and licensing in terms of cost efficiency and OPEX, alongside working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, is very cost-efficient. They allow for improvements, changes, and upgrades which are understandable and clear.

We are planning to implement Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with GPUs this year, and we are currently working on that purchase. 

We are not using it for AI yet; we are just planning this year while working with Dell's representative office on it. We look for solutions suitable for AI and GPU, while previously we considered flash disks and CPUs for cloud platforms and RAID controllers as important for implementing HCI.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten.

I use the solution primarily for software-defined networking, and there are some AI workloads present as well. We started last year, but previously, it was mostly about software-defined networking and private clouds. We mainly used OpenStack. These are the main use cases I run with PowerEdge.

It's quite good at handling diverse applications. I don't have any complaints about that. It's very smooth.

We have not experienced any security incidents or vulnerabilities with PowerEdge Servers.

Dell PowerEdge has reduced operational overheads in terms of support and operations build.

I am a fan of its ability to handle the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. It's very demanding. I mostly use it with a CPU load of nearly eighty to ninety percent, with workloads where we take the maximum output from the servers on the cloud. It has been sustainable and reliable in terms of compute.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped reduce our downtime by a lot. The production downtimes are mostly planned. My system is designed in a resilient way, but with PowerEdge Servers, I don't need a one-to-one ratio redundancy, which leads to about eighty percent downtime reduction. It has also reduced operational overheads related to support and operations.

I like that it is stable. Things become very difficult over time when you increase the security. In Dell's case, it is very stable, and I like that it's very process-oriented.

The security is on par to the global standard. We always get market standard security. Upgrades run smoothly and seemlessly.

Their biggest strength is their stability under heavy workloads and their long term reliability. I don't think they have any weaknesses. 

The solution can be improved in terms of firmware backward supportability. With the sixteenth generation servers I am using, slightly older kernels and drivers are not supported. I have to use the latest OS because the drivers and particular support are not there. 

The rack port supportability for the latest PowerEdge servers is not great. Until the fourteenth generation, I never faced this issue. From the fifteenth and sixteenth generations, this issue has started occurring. 

These servers are not very adaptive to the multiple GPU model. I can insert at most two GPUs. While the Dell server in terms of compute is capable of handling multiples, the physical design does not allow more in terms of placement space.

I have used the solution for the last six years.

The stability is quite good. I have no complaints about it as it is very smooth.

The scalability of the solution is very easy. The process is seamless.

The customer service was good in certain aspects, but I mostly had services where things became complex because of the software-defined networking applications. They use things differently, so I have to consult first and make arrangements. Designing and all those parts take time, so customer service can be improved in terms of timing.

Positive

I have used Cisco, HP, and Supermicro in the past. PowerEdge was not originally selected for stability and hardware compatibility,

We use Dell deployment services for the storage solutions, not for PowerEdge.

There is a return on investment because I have been using them for the last four or five years. ROI is there, but it's a complex assessment when considering the return on investment from the hardware. It's part of a complete solution where I would assess this aspect.

The total cost of ownership for support and operations has reduced significantly. In terms of stability, I seldom encounter support cases or operational costs. They have been stable and running for years without performance downtime or significant disc failures, providing me an edge in operational and support costs.

My advice to anybody considering Dell PowerEdge is to check the new ranges which are more adaptive towards AI. The R750 and R760 are general-purpose servers, so they need to look into AI-specific servers where more GPUs can be incorporated. On PowerEdge Servers specifically, the benefits are clear. I would rate them nine out of ten.