Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

We mainly use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for virtualization and for Windows-based file servers and domain controllers.

By implementing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we mainly wanted to achieve good support from the manufacturer.

The department that maintains the data center has considerably fewer worries than before.

I cannot assess Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in terms of energy consumption because we have them hosted in a data center, and the consumption does not depend on us. Similarly, I cannot assess Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads because we do not have high-performance environments. Our environment is pretty basic.

In terms of the impact of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers on our organization’s sustainability goals, I am not aware of the company's sustainability goals, but I believe that Dell has a sustainable development policy. At a booth at this convention, they show how they handle the entire issue of recycled packaging and equipment.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have clearly reduced unplanned production downtime, but I cannot exactly say how much.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have not affected the overall flexibility of our operations or business but virtualization did.

The reliability of its hardware and the support they provide are valuable.

At the moment, I do not have an area for improvement. We have a cloud-first strategy, and hardware is starting to become more and more secondary, so we are not betting on it.

My expectations for it are that it will work while we migrate to the cloud, and it will remain as reliable as it is now so that in the future, we continue using it for the uploads that we need to have locally.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for more than ten years.

The stability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is extraordinary.

It depends on what you buy, but in principle, if you work with rack servers, the scaling is horizontal, so you just have to keep adding to it.

We do not have any difficulty in scaling. In the end, virtualization systems allow you to scale very easily. Above all, the software is the one that provides scalability here.

Their support is very good.

We have used HPE ProLiant and Cisco UCS. We do not only work with Dell. We also work with other manufacturers. The main difference between the server solutions would be the price.

I am a part of the decision-making core team and the approval core team, so I am ultimately the one who opts for one technology or another, one manufacturer or another, as long as the purchasing department finds the price fair.

The installation was very simple in the end. The strategy was to virtualize. Once you are already involved in virtualization, things are very easy.

We have a hybrid cloud. We work mainly with ANALEC, but the entire management part of the cloud migration is carried out from the headquarters in Mexico. We only participate. We do not make any decisions for the cloud strategy. We, of course, need to have visibility over the strategy from Mexico, and we use that when making decisions about the software solutions that run on top of the hardware. In this case, we will bet on VMware instead of IPV.

These servers are located in our main data center. We have some PowerEdge servers left. We opted for FX chassis a few years ago too, and we have some PowerEdge servers left.

In this case, we counted on ANALEC TECHNOLOGY for help, who also has a booth here at the convention.

The return on investment is mainly in terms of availability. Downtime has significantly reduced, which often is a hidden cost or not taken into account. That is a great ROI.

The pricing policies of the manufacturers vary based on the company, but generally, they are quite correct. What happens is that the purchasing departments of companies like ours do a lot for the price, and sometimes, you find yourself forced to work with another manufacturer. We have two main vendors that we work with to have aligned prices, and Dell is one of them.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

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

We use them for general Windows deployments for domain controllers, file print servers, and database servers.

PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. They have been resilient.

The iDRAC for remote access is the most useful feature because it's built into the machine. I can reboot them without having to be there physically. We do a lot of what we do remotely, and it handles that fine.

Also, the signed firmware, drift detection, and BIOS recovery are useful features in the current security climate. Physically, they're reasonably secure, with locking mechanisms on the physical hardware, and the update processes for firmware fall within the parameters we require for our security.

The OpenManage console for lifecycle management provides an intuitive user experience. The interface is easy to understand. In terms of our IT staff's productivity, it makes things quicker. It's a lot quicker to access OpenManage remotely than actually having to go and look at the server. It depends on where the server is and where most of our staff are. It could save five minutes or it could save two hours. It has also decreased the time it takes to deploy new data centers.

Perhaps they could make it more power efficient. They're pretty good, but there's always room for improvement.

Also, they could try to reduce heat generation.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge Servers for about 20 years.

They're pretty reliable, so we don't have to replace them that often; we just have to maintain them.

We've not had to scale them up from what we've deployed, generally.

But when it comes to handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads, they seem to be keeping up to date and providing the latest hardware to keep up with the requirements.

Dell's technical support is generally pretty good.

Neutral

We used HPE previously. We switched to Dell PowerEdge because they were more cost-effective.

The servers that we've deployed have all been in place for long enough to give us a full return on their value.

The pricing is usually in line with what we expect from Microsoft.

To protect our systems from malware and other firmware attacks we use third-party tools.

I work at a university in a research environment. We use PowerEdge powered by Intel servers to run geophysics simulations that stay in the system for a long time. The servers are used to image and process massive data sets. We develop code that requires a moderate amount of power, so that's why we use the racks. 

We currently have between five to ten units, but some of them are down. It's mostly graduate students and a few faculty using them, and we primarily run Linux. The built-in security features aren't really an issue because everything is behind the university's firewalls. We don't have to worry about it because they have a dedicated IT security department. We can dial in from the outside, and we have all kinds of VPN solutions.

The university provides us with batteries and power supplies. They often run for more than a year without any failures, so power isn't a problem. 

We are working with Intel's Xeon scalable processor, but I'm not sure which models we are using. We typically buy the most advanced processor available when we purchase the racks. 

At this time, we have no plans to switch to cloud servers because it's not as comfortable as having an on-premises rack. Also, there are some security restrictions associated with some of our applications, so we can't transfer the data to the cloud. We work with a lot of data, so we prefer local resources because of the security and the speed. 

It does the job for us. We know it's not a high-end product, but it's good enough. We are looking at getting another box. The next series should be 940. The step is not as big as we expected after having the 930 for several years now. We're thinking about getting another one from Dell, but I'm waiting to see what will be available. We are looking for a 4U rack, fully loaded with CPUs and disks. And we have a disk farm outside that we connect to the server, so we can store a lot of data locally. 

We've had no problems with high-performance workloads on our Dell racks. We use the standard software like Intel compilers plus our in-house code, OpenMP, Pilot Processing, and MPI. Intel's Xeon processors improve the performance of our targeted workloads, which is crucial for us. 

We buy the strongest CPUs and run the Intel compiler. We usually run heavy code, so we're working on traditional software languages like Fortran and C. These are heavy applications that run on this cluster.

We started working on Dell servers more than a decade ago. I think it was the 910 version, and its main advantage was the ability to load a lot of in-core memory into the box. It's irrelevant today because everybody can provide as much as they want, but we had memory issues in the beginning. 

We were running out of memory, and that was the first time we heard of a solution that supports a terabyte of core memory. That was the primary reason we got the first box. We've stayed with it since then because we have so many Dell workstations.

Dell servers are easy to use. We've never had a problem. We do more hardware work with workstations, including adding and replacing cards. It's easy compared to what we used to do with screwdrivers years ago. 

Capacity and performance can always be improved. 

I have been using Dell servers for nearly 15 years. 

PowerEdge servers powered by Intel are highly stable. Some of them have stayed on for two years without ever rebooting. Usually, they only reboot for maintenance or something happening in the building, but it is not due to a failure of the machine. Stability is essential because we have jobs that sit on the system for a couple of days.

I haven't used Dell's technical support much. Usually, when I have a problem, we search online for a solution. Sometimes we use the Dell knowledge base or community groups, but we rarely need to contact someone.

Deploying the PowerEdge Rack Servers wasn't a problem. We just plug it into the rack with help from the university computer center. They let us know where to put it and connect it to the required network.

We take care of all the software, like the operating system, permissions, local security, data access, etc. This is all Linux-based, and we have experience, so it's straightforward. For maintenance, we use Dell's OpenManage console a little to tweak the configuration for performance, but we generally set up the system and let it go. We only update the operating system once a year and upgrade the environment.

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

I'm used to Dell equipment, and the local network is mainly based on Dell workstations connected to the servers. The other servers are usually IBM and HP. I haven't seen any major difference that would justify switching to other vendors.

I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers nine out of ten. 

Our main uses for PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are virtualization, file servers, and Active Directory, which our entire infrastructure sits on.

I have five Dell PowerEdge servers now. About 40,000 users are using these servers. About 70 to 80 people use the file server.

Support for virtualization is very important to us. It provides redundancy when booting from storage, where the servers are loaded from a separate storage. It provides full server support.

The use of OpenManage Console reduces the time it takes to manage PowerEdge Rack Servers in terms of updates and maintenance.

Unfortunately, PowerEdge Rack Servers do not support NVMe storage.

OpenManage Console is slightly confusing, especially after upgrade releases. There isn't a manual for what to do with lifecycle management and in what sequence. I have to rely on user forums instead of Dell in these cases.

This is my third purchase. I bought my first three PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel two years ago.

The primary reason that we chose PowerEdge - they are stable and don’t crash.

I keep my firmware, BIOS, and drivers up-to-date. Regarding security, we have not had any incidents.

The two Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers that I am using solve my needs completely in terms of redundancy and scalability.

I used Dell support a couple of times, and it was okay.

I would rate Dell’s support as eight out of 10. When resolving an issue, they transferred me to multiple support techs. This is because when you reach global support, your request is processed by the operator. Then, there are a few other steps. Usually, I am asked primitive questions before being transferred to Tier 2 or 3, who take a couple of days to get back to me.

Positive

One of the reasons that we choose to use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is because we never had a problem with the previous ones. Whereas, we have had servers and blades from Lenovo with a lot of problems. There were constant motherboard failures.

In addition to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we also have Dell's storage. Since there have been no problems with them, except for routine battery changes, we continue to use Dell’s reliable hardware. 

It was straightforward with the help of the Dell wizard. I just needed to connect it to VMware. Obviously, someone has to study when preparing to deploy and configure PowerEdge Rack Servers. In my case, deployment and configuration of two PowerEdge Rack Servers with VMware, cloud, and integration with our storage took about three days.

My strategy was to launch these servers as quickly as possible. First, we made sure that there was communication. Then, we installed clients in VMware. After that, we started installing the PowerEdge Rack Servers.

As an educational institution, we have certain budget restraints. So, we work around our budget and what hardware we can get from it.

We considered Lenovo and HPE, but chose Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers because of their reliability.

Choose stable servers when considering fast servers, because even though they might work fast, they might not last. We have been happy with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

I would absolutely rate PowerEdge Rack Servers as 10 out of 10.

We use this solution for data protection and for securing customer data using a solution from Veritas Technology and Dell's hardware.

The PowerEdge systems management frameworks have enabled us to progress towards full automation when it comes to managing PowerEdge. Especially on the security front, we extensively rely on the APIs provided by Dell management systems, and we do integrate it with our software.

In terms of operations, this gives a lot of flexibility. Also different customers have different choices and options, and we can enable different security modes and options for our customers using these features.

The features I've found to be most valuable are integrated management, hardware flexibility, and the latest technology that Dell brings to the table.

We deploy PowerEdge servers in a hyperconverged environment, and often, the workloads are compute- and network-intensive workloads. The PowerEdge servers are capable of taking on more workloads and offering more benefits to the customers.

We extensively rely on PowerEdge servers' security features, and we use APIs offered by Dell systems so that we can enable those security features depending on customer requirements.

iDRAC Telemetry does offer a lot of capabilities, and we expose those capabilities to our customers. We use iDRAC extensively for managing the systems, report generation, understanding firmware deviation and drift, and many other capabilities.

There needs to be more flexibility for business options.

I've been using it for the past five years.

It's a pretty stable solution; no issues have been reported. All of the customers are pretty happy with the Dell PowerEdge Rack servers.

It's scalable. The hyperconverged solution is all about scaling based on customer demand. Our software and the Dell hardware are pretty linearly scalable, which helps our customers have a predictable way of expanding to address increased demands.

We have storage and backup administrators in the data centers and enterprise world who use this product.

We definitely want to increase usage and accelerate and expand more.

Technical support is awesome. Every time we have run into some typical third party firmware issues, which may not be Dell's problem, we have always got great support from Dell. I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We haven't run into any complexities when setting up Dell systems for our end-customers.

For the deployment, one person is sufficient to handle it without any hassles.

The maintenance and management are pretty simple, and an administrator can manage hundreds of these systems efficiently.

Deployment typically takes no more than 20 to 25 minutes maximum if the customer is ready with the network and has taken care of any other environments.

We definitely want to leverage the automation capabilities in terms of deployment because the deployment times will be even less. Moving forward, that's the plan.

We implemented it ourselves.

I don't see any issues with respect to licensing. It's power-efficient, so it's beneficial to the customers price-wise. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee.

We looked at well known server vendors. The main reason we went with Dell PowerEdge servers is the stability of the product.

The predictable linear scale and the fact that most of our customers love Dell hardware were the other reasons.

Also, if we integrate and support Dell hardware, then it stands to reason that our solution will also get a wider read option.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that with modern technology the parameters are rapidly changing. So, you have to make sure to look at all the current and future growth requirements and evaluate accordingly.

I recommend Dell PowerEdge Rack servers and rate them at ten on a scale from one to ten. Go with the latest technology, the latest server, and the firmware that's offered by Dell. Leverage all the scalability features, which are built for the next generation, that is, for hyperconverged and cloud type of deployments.

We're having increased performance. That's one of the big reasons we went with these PowerEdge servers.

The iDRAC that comes with the systems is great. It allows us to scale out a lot faster than before.

PowerEdge servers are good for handling and evolving high-performance workloads. We get everything that we need.

The biggest needs within our company are performance, stability, and support. If and when something goes wrong hardware-wise, a quick resolution is always a wonderful thing to have.

We do not use Dell's memory in our PowerEdge environment. We do use them separately.

PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. The firmware updates that have been pushed out have reduced the amount of DIMM memory failures or false alarms. That's been really good. That's the main concern we have.

In terms of the iDRAC software, when selecting systems, especially multiple systems to upgrade, there's really no way to confirm specific systems that are selected. It'll just tell you a number and it's very vague. It says, "Hey, you're about to perform this action on X amount of systems." If it had more visibility, then that would provide more peace of mind for our team and everyone else who uses the iDRAC software as well.

We've been using these PowerEdge rack servers for about two years now.

The technical support is good.

Whenever we ask for clarification on an action plan, we get the required feedback so that we can make informed decisions on our end. We'd love it if they'd keep up with the process that they currently have.

Positive

We switched over to Dell as they were highly competitive in their pricing, and their specs were either identical or gave better performance than some of the other options we were looking at.

The pricing was extremely competitive, and it's one of the big reasons why we went with Dell.

We use the servers on multiple of our data centers located throughout the United States, and the performance and stability of these systems have been phenomenal.

We did not consider public cloud services before choosing PowerEdge DRAC services.

Performance-wise, hardware-wise, it is solid, however, it could use some improvements around iDRAC. Therefore, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

For those considering the solution, I would advise starting by doing some research. The system is incredibly stable and performs similarly to other systems that we're reviewing.

We primarily use the solution for compute servers. We use them as compute servers to run our virtual machines on-load, mainly on VMware.

The R6 series has been very valuable as it's more cost-effective and it has a lot of features. Based on the requirements, we found the R6 Series would be best suited for our customers. Reliability-wise, it's also great.

PowerEdge is for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads, including VDI, AI, and SAP. We did run PowerEdge servers with virtual workloads, especially on VDI. We realized that SSD is necessary, especially with VMware vSphere platforms as the IO requirements are quite high.

In terms of security, there’s been no issue from our side. In terms of BIOS, it is secure and we can go and log into BIOS to change certain settings.

PowerEdge is good for energy consumption. PowerEdge Servers run on optimal voltage. Compared to other competitors or other brands, the power rating is great.

We use iDRAC for many years already. It's an item we need to buy. We’ve had no problems so far. We use it for monitoring purposes to configure SNMP and the servers.

PowerEdge analytics helped to decrease production downtime.

The data points I’d draw attention to for potential customers depend on how much the customer is going to spend. If there is a certain budget, we would plan around their budget. In terms of analytics, most of the time, our monitoring service is able to collect the data metrics already, so having PowerEdge analytics is a complement to our existing monitoring system. While it's good to have, it depends of course on the customer's budget. If their budget is small, we will take away analytics to save costs.

PowerEdge helped to reduce our customer’s data processing time. In fact, they were getting a lot of data from here, from their data processing. We also partner with some Big Data Analytics which run data points. In terms of PowerEdge, it's running fine except for certain power failures from time to time. In terms of how much they’ve reduced the data processing producing power, I don't have the metrics to comment on.

PowerEdge systems management frameworks enable us to progress towards full automation when it comes to managing PowerEdge. We find it very useful in terms of automation, the setup, and configuration, as it does offer setup and proper checks. With the servers, we just need to set our black bar and then push down the setup and configurations box into PowerEdge and we run after that.

We do encounter power supply failures from time to time, however, in terms of operations, the production uptime, the production is not affected, and the SLA is still within the stipulated time.

In the future, we hope that the noise level will be lower.

I've used the solution for quite a long while. Likely, it's been more than 10 years.

We've had no issues with scaling so far. We have been using PowerEdge for years and we are able to scale well. For networking, we need to build the network to scale, and it hasn't been a problem.

Dell support is responsive. They dispatch an engineer on-site to help us within their SLA plan. They are very good so far.

That said, we would appreciate it if the engineer came down with the parts beforehand so they can resolve hardware issues on the spot.

Positive

We deployed many series of PowerEdge for many years. We also used other vendors, including HP and Cisco among others. I would say that in terms of reliability, they are a bit better than Dell in terms of power supplies. 

The deployment time depends on the size of the setup. So far, we haven't had any problems with the setup.

We engage with vendors to do the setup as unboxing PowerEdge and mounting them onto racks. This is especially true if we are talking about hundreds of servers.

Dell can actually do everything in their staging environment, in their warehouse, before shipping everything to customers. We've been quite satisfied with Dell's level of service so far.

The product meets our requirements. Cost-wise, certain configurations in PowerEdge maybe cost a bit extra. Especially the SSD drives.

The cost will increase if we go with the rack-and-stack approach.

We are partners with Dell.

We use the R series, namely R620, 630, then after that 720, 730, and with the XD series as well. We deploy them in data centers. Inside the data centers, there are systems as well as cloud systems; typically the deployment is hybrid.

We don’t use Dell's cloud view for predictive analytics.

I can’t speak to PowerEdge's accelerated tuning in terms of helping to support demanding workloads. We have not used GPU yet.

I'd advise new users to go ahead and assess PowerEdge. Of course, companies need to get their representative to send some metrics, especially the MTBF or certain components on Dell products. We realize that the power supply may be a weak link when running high loads constantly. In terms of other components, there are no issues. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We mostly use Power Servers for our R&D lab where we deploy the labs for developers and other testers to do their high-end testing and more.

The burden on the IT team has been reduced thanks to this solution, the monitoring, and other features. The deployment and giving access to the end-users have been easy. Overall, the amount of work that the IT team has to invest in came down drastically.

There are a lot of features. To be specific, the amount of virtual memory that we can use and the scalability are something that I like much. If you ask me what is the best feature, I would say the scalability. I don't have to invest in the new servers when I can scale this one. That is something which helped us a lot.

PowerEdge is great for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

I would rate PowerEdge’s approach to security with its signed Firmware, drift detection, and BIOS at a ten out of ten. Everything is easy to upgrade. It's easy to maintain and easy to work with.

In terms of energy consumption, it's consuming less than the previous servers.

We use PowerEdge for artificial intelligence applications. Our developers and QA use it and our developers develop the AI feature products.

Using artificial intelligence does solve problems for us in terms of using the servers for our developers.

The PowerEdge Eye Track telemetry for monitoring system data and providing analytics helps us get the job done and makes it easier in terms of monitoring.

PowerEdge has accelerated us in order to help support our demanding workloads.

The solution should give us an option to add on new hardware features. For example, the new hardware, specifically the SoCs that come in, and the NB RAMs that are coming, should have that feature as well. The existing ones are okay, however, the older version that we currently use, which is two years old, doesn't have that feature. 

I've been in the company for the last six years, and we were using the product even before that.

The solution is very stable and serves its purpose.

Technical support is very good. We had issues with the hardware replacement that was to be done on PowerEdge. They made sure that they stood by their four spare replacements.

Positive

I was involved in the initial setup of this solution. It was easy.

I was using the Power Servers for the last 14 years and it was transferred from the day I started working on the servers. It was always easy to set up for me and easy to train my employees. However, I don't do that anymore, my staff does it for me. However, it remains easy to set up.

I can't comment much on the licensing as it is not directly from Dell. It's our partner's pricing that we have to depend on. Pricing is competitive compared to others in the market.

I'm not sure which model we use, it's been three years.

We do not use the cloud and new predictive analytics.

I'd advise other potential users to go for it and evaluate it with the other vendors. However, in my experience, PowerEdge stands out.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We used PowerEdge as our main servers for all things virtual and as our file servers as well. We had a lot of VPN users as most of the company is remote. There wasn't as much lag time when dealing with file transfer, specifically in the office. Using the PowerEdge Servers and the Dell switch stack interchangeably skyrocketed the firm in the office.

The monitoring system is really helpful. I'm a one-man team, and I run systems and IT for a pretty big company. The ease of use of being able to flip through a browser tab was the most valuable feature for me.

As for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads, PowerEdge has a lot more flexibility for scaling. It has everything that you would want for a business that's growing.

In terms of PowerEdge's approach to security with its firmware and drift detection, there have been no issues with any updates or security breaches.

The company had to move to a new building, and one of the main concerns was energy consumption. As far as I know, there were a lot of eco settings present to make sure that the PowerEdge Rack Servers used the proper amount of energy.

I've had zero downtime in the three and a half years I've been in the company. Prior to my time, I do know that the uptimes of the systems were very long. From all the records and logs of the previous IT administrator, I can see that there were no issues with the servers.

The servers get slower at the end of their life cycle. The technology needs to evolve.

Also, when you have separate servers and have to add connections between them, they slow down.

I used this solution for about a year and a half since I joined the company. The company was using it at least since 2015.

There hasn't been a whole lot of downtime and zero issues with stability.

There's expandability, and you can scale with PowerEdge Rack Servers.

About 80% to 85% of our workforce is remote, and they all use laptops. About half of that comes back to the server through a VPN. There are only about 60 people in the office using the solution on-premises.

I've had no issues with technical support, and they've been very quick and responsive. I've had to call them, maybe three times in the last three years. I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty standard servers. You put them on the rack, you plug them in, and you set up the settings.

We weren't paying very much, but it was at the end of the lifecycle. We're now using the VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure, and the pricing was very similar for the same amount of power but with easier automation.

Make sure that it fits your company now and your company in the future because if you don't build for scalability, you will get caught by a foot and have to buy more stuff.

I would recommend PowerEdge Rack servers to smaller organizations and not to larger ones like ours.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate PowerEdge Rack servers at nine.