Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

The use case for having Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in our university is that they are sources and resources for our infrastructure. We use it for our VMware infrastructure and VDI.

The feature I appreciate the most about the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the iDRAC, as we were able to remove our KVMs from the data center and use iDRAC as a management platform. 

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers help my organization overall since they are very reliable and very scalable.

I actually love the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers the way they are right now.

I would improve the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers by enhancing the GUI and providing a better hands-on experience for quick fixes on the servers, as most of the work is done by a vendor coming in to fix the systems. Having some videos online on the disassembly of the servers would be helpful.

My name is Pedro Lopez, and I've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for 10 years while working at my university for over 15 years.

Regarding downtime with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, they're very reliable, so we hardly have any downtime, and we have quick turnaround on repairs.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support the growing needs of my university, as the scalability allows us to add more resources fast. We have good turnaround with our vendor partners and getting the new equipment in as soon as possible.

I would rate the customer service and technical support a ten out of ten. I love support from Dell; they have always been able to help us throughout any issues we have.

Positive

Before putting in the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we evaluated solutions from other vendors, including HP and Cisco.

My experience deploying the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers includes purchasing the Dell equipment, where we get professional services.

Dell's professional services as great, as they're very helpful and also do cross-training with us. We're able to learn from the experience of the setup.

I see a return on investment with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. They're very cost-effective and reliable, and we were able to downsize.

The pricing for the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is reasonable since we are part of higher ed, making the prices very competitive with other vendors we have approached.

We chose the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers based on our history with Dell and the cost.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not play a role in my organization's AI initiatives at the moment, as we're barely hitting that, striving towards AI.

I'm currently a server administrator, system administrator, and we remotely manage most of the servers using iDRAC.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are very reliable, very cost-effective, and the services that Dell provides are very useful and helpful in deploying infrastructures. I really love the solutions that iDRAC gives you for quick updates and firmware, ensuring that they're reliable for our systems.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as a ten; I definitely really love them and would not change that for anything at the moment.

Our company uses Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers primarily for VMware, but we also have several PowerEdge for NAS storage.

I am a system administrator. I deploy new servers. More recently, I've been decommissioning old servers and getting those ready to refurbish because we have to resell or surplus them. I also help look up specs to recommend to my director what we should get for the next refresh.

From using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, our company has realized sustainability and reliability, as we don't have to worry about whether they will go down or not. They have been very reliable, except for one server issue, which had nothing to do with Dell or the server itself, just an act of nature.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the iDRAC, because it allows me to remotely access it from my computer without having to plug in a monitor and keyboard. I can see what's wrong and manually push updates if needed. For example, we recently had a motherboard that was bad, and iDRAC informed me of the faulty component, which is helpful because it saves me from guessing what's wrong.

A nice-to-have feature for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers would be shorter lengths because we recently got a new data center with horizontal PDUs, and we had to replace some PowerEdges due to their longer sizes, which wouldn't fit without taking out the PDUs and switching to vertical ones.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for three years now, and from what I can tell, my company has been using them for a very long time. They're great.

They are very reliable.

We are a small to medium-sized organization. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers cater to the needs of our small to medium-sized company, as we can contact our Dell rep and explain our needs, and they can recommend the perfect PowerEdge for us.

I would describe my experience with Dell's support for PowerEdge solutions as great, as we had to get a motherboard replaced, and the replacement part arrived the next business day, which was impressive. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

They tried HPE servers for a bit, but they didn't really like them.

The only challenge we faced was when they were longer servers. We couldn't fit them in our rack without taking out the PDUs.

I know the pricing for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers went up last year, and we weren't too happy about that, but it is what it is.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a 10 out of 10.

Our use case mainly involves running our exchange server 2019 on the SimpliVity, along with other healthcare-related servers that are also on HP, including the domain controller. We are moving away from HP because of their support issues and solutions.

The most valuable function we found in Hyper-Converged is the application version we are currently using, which is HP SimpliVity version 4.1.0.266, although we are not fully satisfied with it. We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers without issues. We occasionally replace one or two servers, but the majority are still functioning well. We've relied on Dell's EqualLogic storage for over ten years, receiving many alerts but overall having a perfectly functioning setup in the back end.

Dell's support is an area that needs improvement as their product reliability is good, but the support is not as strong as HP's. I suggest that Dell should include a built-in backup solution in VxRail, similar to what we find in Sangfor, where the backup feature is integrated.

We have been working with HP Hyper-Converged for around five years.

We have never faced unplanned downtime with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

After HP SimpliVity, the hyper-converged solution, we are not using any more HP servers. We are working with Nutanix and Sangfor, and previously we also worked with Dell. Initially, these servers were with Dell, but we moved them to HP SimpliVity after the hardware expired. Our reason for this shift was based on a technical and financial comparison, as we got a better price from HP.

Dell's pricing has been high for us, which led us to move to SimpliVity.

We are still working with Nutanix products, and we also moved to another vendor called Sangfor. We are using HP SimpliVity as our hyper-converged solution, but we are not satisfied with their services and support. We have 24 nodes of HP SimpliVity, and this year we decide not to renew the contract as we plan for one more solution which could be Nutanix to replace the SimpliVity.

We use Dell's EqualLogic storage technology and Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers R740, R730, R740, and R750 servers. We are also using some applications and one or two servers from HP for Cisco operations. We have been working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for maybe ten years. We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for our healthcare applications and for running an old version of the exchange server.

The main benefits we receive from Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are stability and reliability. While we occasionally receive complaints about hard disk failures, overall, we find the solution satisfactory. We could not continue with Dell due to high pricing, but we have transitioned to HP and are now moving to Sangfor and Nutanix.

Flexibility-wise, both Dell and HP solutions are okay for us, as we run VMware on Dell hardware, managing around 120 to 130 virtual machines. In the past, we primarily used Dell while paying to Dell and VMware, but given the changes in VMware's pricing after Broadcom's acquisition, we are now transitioning to HCI solutions that provide similar features.

We cannot give a proper estimation of power consumption due to high cooling and availability in our data center, but our HCI solutions consume less electricity now compared to older Dell servers, which had high energy consumption. We are not familiar with AI workloads, as no one has presented this feature to us. We purchased the product from a third-party business partner.

When comparing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with HP SimpliVity, we see that they serve different purposes; Dell operates standalone on VMware, whereas HP is a hyper-converged solution. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers stands out as a better option in this context. Overall, we give Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a final rating of six out of ten.

We are using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for multiple applications, majorly for virtualization solutions. We are using R740 for virtualization, such as VMware and Hypervisor, and R760 for heavy processes such as BigQuery solution and data processing. There are many macros and VBAs running for huge financial processes. For that, we are using R760, and we are using R740 for backup solutions. Currently, 90% of usage is dedicated to virtualization technology.

As the data center lead, I oversee operations for my company across India. One of our primary concerns is Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and uptime. Performance is crucial, and Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers offer a lot of impressive performance. Over the past three to four years, they have provided me with almost 99.999% uptime, which is a significant benchmark for our operations. The servers have not gone down at all during this period.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers have successfully reduced my unplanned production downtimes.

We have analyzed the last six months to a year of energy consumption. It has saved us about 30% in energy usage and only produced 4%-5% percent of CO2 emissions, which is quite impressive.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series assists our organization in achieving sustainability goals. It provides a remarkable uptime of 99.999%, which contributes significantly to stability. Additionally, its performance is excellent, currently serving more than 15,000-20,000 users. It’s incredibly effective. I would definitely rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

The first and most important are the security features, especially the inbuilt encryption, which is one of the major business cases for choosing Dell servers over other manufacturers because the security features in terms of encryption and other cryptographic aspects are excellent. 

The second part is the hardware stability; the hardware stability, maintenance, and downtime given by Dell servers occurs once a year for one server, or sometimes not at all. Hardware stability compared to any other manufacturer makes Dell very good, especially the R-Series and M-Series. 

Based on my experience, one area where Dell could improve the PowerEdge R-Series servers is in the disk bus controllers. There is a need for advancements in this area from a hardware perspective. While PowerEdge has several AI-enabled models and is making strides in technology, I believe that the hard disk controllers need to be more effective compared to competitors like Lenovo and HPE. Currently, even when using SSDs or SaaS disk models in my Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, the throughput is roughly 10%-15% lower compared to similar offerings from HPE and Lenovo. While this doesn't have a major impact on my business, it is worth noting since Dell has a strong position in Gartner ratings.

Overall, the hardware quality is good, but I frequently encounter errors that are not hardware-related; they're mainly cyclic errors where the server struggles to process data as quickly as other manufacturers' controllers. Despite this, I am completely satisfied with the functionality of the Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Flexibility is a debatable topic, and I would rate it about a six out of ten. When it comes to flexibility, we do need to account for downtime if we want to extend or make changes. There are very few hot-pluggable devices in Dell servers compared to others, making online plug-and-play opportunities limited. So, I would rate flexibility as a six rather than a five.

I have been working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series for more than five years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series reduced unplanned production downtimes. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has many inbuilt SAS controllers, and scalability is very effective, warranting a rating of eight.

Technical support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series products deserves a rating of ten out of ten because it is about a four-hour ETR, so they are getting it closed within four to five hours.

Lenovo was previously used, but they are not competitive enough in that segment now. HPE is providing good competition for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but for us, Dell is definitely better. 

It's a half-a-day setup process. It's very simple.

The integration of Dell PowerEdge R-Series products is handled completely by our in-house team. I have not worked with Dell Professional Services recently, but I did work with them about four years ago. It was excellent three or four years back, but now I’m not sure if it meets those standards.

Year on year, the ROI is comparatively less. We typically opt for five years of AMC, and when comparing cloud and on-premise costs, our on-premise solution is much cheaper—almost 85% cheaper than cloud. Regarding ownership, with AMC for five years with pro support, we have good peace of mind.

The pricing for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is neither the highest nor the lowest. It's appropriately priced, and we secured Dell PowerEdge R-Series for a very good deal.

We are working with models R740, R750, and R760.. 90% of our solutions on Dell PowerEdge R-Series run on VMware. We initiated AI solutioning with bot deployment almost a year and a half ago. We are not beginners in AI, as we have implemented it in most business cases from ticketing mechanisms to fault tolerance mechanisms. While we are not claiming to be very mature in AI, we are at an intermediate stage of using AI solutions in our environment. 

We currently have limited AI workloads running on our PowerEdge servers. About 60% of our overall infrastructure has been migrated to cloud solutions. We are now leveraging microservices for AI from the cloud. Previously, most of our on-premises AI applications in the data centers were primarily focused on ticketing solutions, where we had deployed and implemented AI operations (AIOps). However, we are in the process of migrating those operations to the cloud as well. So, overall, there isn't much running on the PowerEdge servers in the data center at the moment.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine out of ten.

We deployed Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to support a VMware environment, and we're looking for something else, but primarily it's to support our software that we're delivering to our customers, allowing them to bring their own hardware if they wish; however, if they want us to provide it, we only bring Dell.

I find great value in Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, particularly in their excellent serviceability. At cost per feature, the pricing is great; I super love iDRAC and the serviceability, as they're easy to access when needed and work every time, showcasing consistency in quality.

The main benefit my customers see from installing or deploying Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that they don't have to pay much attention to it because it runs smoothly, meaning they don't babysit it as they should, which while not ideal, indicates how stable the product is.

In my opinion, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could improve in clarity when specifying options; for instance, the difference between power supplies can sometimes be a little challenging to understand if you don't already know, but the product itself is great, and I believe it will continue to get better, so I don't have specific requests.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for 15 years.

The main benefit my customers see from installing or deploying Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that they don't have to pay much attention to it because it runs smoothly, meaning they don't babysit it as they should, which while not ideal, indicates how stable the product is.

We've added nodes with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, and when customers expand their usage, they buy new suites on top of what we previously sold them, allowing new nodes to fit in smoothly without causing issues during additions to the stacks.

I haven't needed to use Dell support recently, but I have in the past, and I feel that one of Dell's strong points is their support; they believe you and usually resolve issues without passing you on to someone else, and I appreciate having one person own my case and build a relationship by following up to check if everything is still working.

Positive

I haven't bought anything but Dell in a long time and found myself using other products at customer sites to assist in troubleshooting, and I've always felt that the interfaces on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty intuitive, which isn't always the case with other products.

My role in using and managing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involves specing it, picking it, buying it, ordering it, and installing it, so I manage it end to end until I turn it over to the customers, providing a turnkey service to go with our software that we sell.

We work with a channel partner, distributing under OEM, and while we have a Platinum Dell partner to assist us in quoting and ordering, we maintain relationships with account managers at Dell, who are awesome.

I believe my customers really appreciate the predictability of costs, especially since Dell offers extended warranties that allow them to plan for running their systems for 5 or 6 years while being aware they'll need to purchase new equipment in the future, fitting well with their operations based on expenses.

At cost per feature, the pricing is great.

We've compared Dell's pricing against HP in the past, and I think the pricing is competitive, offering good value.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as a solution overall a 10, as I'm not even considering other servers and am happy with PowerEdge.

We have a variety of servers, including Dell PowerEdge R-Series, as we have a full environment, functioning environment with Kubernetes, virtual servers, and virtual machines that carry on applications, gaming applications.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge R-Series server is the processing speed. The processing speed is the most important thing that we are looking for in a server, and we want it to function fast as the latency is the most important between the end user and our servers to get the application and to get the feedback from the application. 

We have monitoring systems that allow us to see the improvement without benchmarking, including latency and the time taken by Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers to access data from storage and return it.

Dell can improve or speed up the deployment process with more intuitive dashboards, a more intuitive installing process, and maybe more detailed guides that can help the end user to install and implement their servers and racks.

It would be better if it could be, let's say, a bit less complicated to install everything, to make everything work together. I'm usually on the network side mostly, however, for me, configuring the Dell was a bit more complicated than just using the HP since the HP was really straightforward about everything. The Dell was a bit more complicated. I needed to check a lot of stuff. I needed to contact Dell support a few times to understand exactly how to connect the storage portal. 

I have been with the company for about a year, so I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for about a year now.

This solution is able to scale with our organization.

We used Dell's customer service or technical support for connecting the storage to the servers, which was complicated, and we had many issues because the virtual machines didn't really sync. 

We used them several times, and they were very nice about it, however, it still felt like a long process with two or three sessions until we got the full solution that we wanted. For kindness, 

I would rate Dell's customer support a ten out of ten; for technical knowledge, I would rate them a seven or eight.

Positive

I'm also familiar with HP. I didn't see much improvement between the HP servers and Dell PowerEdge R-Series, however, it got a bit faster; the latency went down, and we can see that the processing speed of the applications or the functioning is faster than what we had with HP.

The initial deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, the actual connection, was two or three days' worth of work; deploying the whole environment until everything functioned as we wanted was a process of two or three weeks overall.

Regarding the benefits and how they complete the mission, I would give Dell PowerEdge R-Series a perfect score as they are doing exactly what they need to. 

It took some time, however, they got to where they need to, and it's working as we expected. If someone asks me about Dell PowerEdge R-Series in general, I would say to go check them. 

I have rated this solution ten out of ten.

Our use case for the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that we use them as ESXi hosts in our data centers, and we have approximately three data centers. Its primary use case is ESXi host. We occasionally have a smaller Dell PowerEdge that would be designed for single application-based server. Other than that, that is the main purpose.

The benefit of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to our organization is that our entire infrastructure is VMware driven, so we need ESXi hosts. Our entire VMware systems run off of Dell PowerEdge, so we could not run without it.

One of the most valuable features of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the redundancy that's built into it: redundant power supplies and redundant RAM modules. It takes care of itself in many cases. 

One thing I appreciate about the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers 17s is the numerous new features.

I appreciate the smaller footprint in terms of its efficiency in the racks, less power consumption, and more modular design for installing other components. Hopefully, the components won't be as expensive as installing extra drives and other components. I'm hoping the cost will be driven down by making them more modular.

They make that very user-friendly and easy. In terms of working with the platform regarding driver compatibility, firmware, and the hypervisor, it is excellent.

The price-to-performance ratio of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is good, and performance is great. It is comparable and acceptable.

Besides the minor issues, the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are rock solid and have been for several years now. That is why we continue to use and deploy them.

If I could improve the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in any way, I would say that buying the components separately at a lower cost is the only thing.

I have been using the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since the 10th generation.

I have experienced crashes, downtimes, and performance issues with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We have had a crash here and there, but it has only been one host and not multiple hosts. We were able to bounce back quickly.

The reliability and stability of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is good. We run them in our data center in a high-performance scenario which normally takes life off of the hardware, however, we have had no issues. We still have 10th-generation Dell servers running in our data center, which are very old and still running great.

Dell can grow and scale with the needs of my company, as they always have. The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers cater to the needs of my medium-size business by providing great out-of-box performance from a VMware perspective, scalability, and compatibility with the VMware platform.

If I had to rank Dell support from one to ten, with ten being best and one being worst, I would rank the support as ten. 

Dell support is the best. We have dealt with other support providers. Hands down, Dell is the best in terms of the usability, functionality, and their willingness to help. They help even when a product may go out of warranty, knowing we are loyal customers who will continue to buy their products, they will still do whatever they can to help.

Positive

I don't find the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers to be expensive in general when I buy it a la carte. The aftermarket price for RAM modules and CPU cores is expensive. If I want to switch out a CPU or processor inside of my Dell PowerEdge to gain more cores, which increases my performance for VMware, the aftermarket price is so expensive that we typically take that box, retire an older Dell PowerEdge, and then buy a brand new one.

Before installing the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we had looked at HP and Cisco which also have their own line of virtualized servers. However, considering Dell support and how Dell has been a very good partner with us, we stick with them.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.

We are running Nutanix on top of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, and we're deploying our product that eventually is going to customer dark site environments.

The feature I like the most about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is its reliability. 

There are no items I want to improve on Dell PowerEdge R-Series; maybe just a discount.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for something similar to four years.

Our cluster can be anywhere from for to 30 clusters. It depends on the client. 

The customer service for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is great, however, I cannot say that other companies are better or Dell is better; the customer service is good. 

I would rate the customer service of Dell PowerEdge R-Series an eight out of ten.

Positive

Before using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we used HPE, however, we also are using HPE now as we want to be able to run and make a lot of performance on different hardware. We are running on top of HPE and Dell.

It's a development environment and a product, so I don't think about needing to get the money back for some period; it's a big company.

We are satisfied with what we got from Dell PowerEdge R-Series; there was no need to add it for more functions. I'm not sure what metrics I can provide about the performance of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, however, we are just satisfied with its performance and the compact environment that it provides to us.

The price of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is high, however, somebody needs to pay it.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not help us grow the company or grow the work.

I don't remember the model of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, however, it's either 560 or 720. 

There are servers with a lot of GPUs, and there are servers without GPUs; it depends on the use case. The organization is big, but I'm working on different projects, so it depends on what you mean by big. Our clusters on Dell PowerEdge R-Series are going from four to 30 servers, depending on the client.

We are now at the beginning of 2000 when we actually needed some papers and courses for Dell PowerEdge R-Series. All the information is available on the network, so there are no big challenges; you just go to the network, and you find the exact information that you need. It doesn't matter where I find the information; ChatGPT is doing a great job.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is a great company, and I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten; it's at the top of the technologies, and I'm very satisfied. I see myself continuing with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.