Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers Reviews

Compared to the older versions, and those from other vendors, like HPE servers and some other brands, this one has really saved us a lot of headaches when it comes to hardware replacements. It's something it seems that Dell has improved. You quickly log your support case and get support. The turnaround time is really fast.

Also, compared to the other vendors and generations, this one tends to be more user-friendly, so you spend less time trying to get where you want to go.

The server itself has the most stable updates. The patches and the updates will take you a long way before they release another one, so you aren't constantly doing more updates and upgrades. 

• Its ease of use. The GUI is accessible and everything is pretty much upfront. You don't get lost in navigating between the tabs.
• I also like a feature they call iDRAC. It's a feature that allows you remotely power on and off the server. 
• It's got a power plug.
• It's also almost a tool-less type of server, in the sense that when you want to open it up and change a few components inside, you can do so without a screwdriver or any aid of another tool.
• It also has a nice front panel, it looks nice in front.

Of course, the new generation of servers, I've yet to really use them, the 13th and the 14th generations of the Dell rack servers. I haven't gotten my hands on those yet. But as for the versions that I work with, they used to max out on memory, on RAM, quickly, so I'd want to think in the newer versions, they actually allocate more  processing power and more RAM to them. I'd want to think that's what they did with the newer versions.

It's a very stable product. From a software and hardware perspective, it's actually a bit more stable compared to other versions and vendors. It's definitely quite resilient, we haven't had many failures, hardware or software failures.

It is quite scalable. The other versions come with a lot of allocation or provision for you to scale more, so it is a scalable solution.

We switched because of the kind of support we'd get from the vendor itself, a quick response time. That's a very critical issue; how swiftly can they resolve an issue. That is one of the major reasons for the switch. The other reason was the resiliency of the products, which is one of the benefits we enjoy with the current choice that we made.

The initial setup is quite easy. The Dell OpenManage interface is straightforward, Obviously you have to read through the documentation a bit before you set it up, but it is quite straightforward.

It took us, I would say, a day for each site, because we set it up at three different sites and they're each about 80 kilometers apart. Each site took a day because we had to rearrange our server room, how the cooling would be done, and the power and things like that. Obviously, there were other things contributing to the setup of the server, not the server itself.

Yes, we did also consider other options but we took this option over the other ones because of the response time, support, and we feel that these guys were a leap ahead in terms of the technology itself.

I would tell colleagues to go for it. It's a great product, and as long as they can just stay on the latest and greatest versions, they shouldn't have any issues.

I would give it an eight out of 10. And the chief reasons are its simplicity and ease of use. 

The two points I held back I wouldn't necessarily blame on the product, I would blame it on the area, the part of the world that we are in. I think it tends to take a bit long, like one to two weeks, to replace a spare part. Sometimes it can take long because of the customs issues. Really it has nothing to do with the product itself but with area that I'm in. So someone who's in Europe will likely get better service because they are closer to the manufacturing plants and they can get the equipment in, whereas where we're from, the shipment of that stuff would have to hop notable distances. So if they could have a hub that's more central and closer to where we are, then maybe it would be a perfect 10.  

Ease of use.

Our requirement is 99.9999% uptime. That is what we have experienced from these servers.

With the technology advancements, both the OEMs improve their products for best performance. I would also prefer additional improvements in the thermal design and the management of servers.

I have used Dell servers for nine years.

No issues.

No issues.

The technical support is the best.

We have used SGI, Sun, IBM, and now Fujitsu. The procurement is through open or limited tender only.

The initial setup is mixed between being straightforward and complex.

We have well-defined process for the technical evaluation of pricing.

We evaluate all the responses to our requirements. After the selection is made for two to three products, then commercials are checked and the best price solution is selected.

Check the literature and reviews available for the product. Ask and clarify all the queries before freezing on the requirements.

The convenience, because we can swap very easily swap hard drives when one goes down.

I can't think of anything right now. It's not the perfect solution but it is reasonable.

In the past it has been very stable, but not recently.

I don't have experience with its scalability.

We have used it in the past. When we had problems, we had to contact or put a ticket with them, they would get back to us, they were very reasonable.

Before we had HPE, now we use Dell. We went with Dell because the school has a contract with them.

It was straightforward.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor are, really, everything. Number one though is customer support.

I think their price is reasonable.

• OpenManage Essentials: Loading new firmware is easy, either via OpenManage Essentials, OMIVV, or the iDRAC. It’s just so easy.
• OpenManage Essentials facilitates the build of a desired template (including disk configuration) and pushing this out to multiple hosts at once. This greatly speeds up our deployment times.
• iDRAC 8: Being able to provision and manage RAID virtual disks from the iDRAC is a huge bonus. You don’t have to boot the machine via the console to do this.
• The firmware rollback is great. The iDRAC can store previous versions to make this very quick.

• iDRAC 8 allows you to configure so much of the server without having to use a console. For example, RAID configuration, disk health, and SSD wear.
• It also displays a great amount of environmental history, including temps and power usage, with up to a year of history stored in the iDRAC.
• The vFlash capability is handy, allowing multiple SD partitions to be created and mounted. Being able to load all kinds of firmware via iDRAC is great, e.g., disk, controller, BIOS.
• OpenManage Essentials is better than OneView in my opinion. While it lacks the visual finesse of OneView, it has far more functionality.

OpenManage Essentials could do with a visual “birthday” as it still requires the Silverlight plugin.

OpenManage for vCenter integration is powerful, but also a little buggy. Hardware-wise, they are great. I much prefer the iDRAC architecture over HPE iLO.

We have used the solution for about nine months.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

So far, the technical support has been very good. The self-service portal for requesting replacement parts is extremely easy to use and it is fast.

For technical support tickets, the experience isn’t quite as good. There were some delays in communication.

We used HPE ProLiant. We switched due to significant cost savings in capex as well as operational improvements.

For example, having OpenManage Essentials is better than OneView, at least for rack servers.

The setup was extremely simple.

iDRAC is easier to configure, with the front LCD panel, on the non-XD models, being very handy.

The NFC option for the front bezel combined with the mobile app is great for on-site troubleshooting.

For a small, extra cost, you can get OpenManage Essentials with configuration management. This allows you to deploy pre-configured hardware templates making mass deployment easy.

DELL is typically much cheaper that HPE, for example. Their licensing is far more transparent and simple.

iDRAC licensing is significantly cheaper. Extended support costs are also lower.

We evaluated HPE ProLiant.

It is a great product. Just be mindful of some of the current bugs in OpenManage and OpenManage Integration for vCenter. Other than these, we’ve had a great experience.

These servers have been real work-horses. Dell has done a nice job at including more management tools, with OpenManage and the likes. The DRAC Enterprise is an amazing feature, especially when managing decentralized server farms.

One of the main factors in helping efficacy is having like-branded servers, which have compatible tools. There are are more universal management tools out there, but they are generally pretty costly. The fact that the servers have generally been quite reliable, has really decreased expenditure. I know that when I put a server in place, they will simply run. I had servers that were still from the PE2650, and PE4400 up until fairly recently when everything got replaced. There is something to be said about reliable hardware.

Unfortunately, I am now more in the space of IaaS, so I am a little bit removed from that particular area. In my experience when I was actively using Dell's servers, they were always improving their hardware, and coming up with more efficient solutions. One of the things that I had started using pretty extensively is blade servers, as they are more efficient on energy, and can provide the same computing power as racked servers, yet consume much less rack real estate.

I have used all series of Dell PowerEdge servers for about 12-14 years, through to the 12th generation.

For the most part, my experience with Dell was in conjunction with VMware vSphere, and VMware View. There were some issues that I encountered with the servers, but it is a result of having multiple server generations with different processors in place, which caused some problems with HA and DRS with VMware, but these don't necessarily quality as issues with the servers themselves. From a hardware perspective, these servers have always been rock solid.

I think the customer support at Dell is adequate, at least when it comes to their server support team. Some other areas are more lacking, but over all, and as it relates to servers, I have no complaints.

Most of my experience has been with Dell servers, so I can't comment much on different solutions.

If you're familiar with deploying servers, then it's not really complex. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to setting up the OpenManage server and agents, but nothing unsurmountable.

I have always deployed my own servers. If you are operating in an SMB, I would recommend that you get your hands dirty, and learn how these servers are setup, connected, etc., as it is going to be a matter of when, not if, that the server is going to have some failed component, that you're going to want to know how to deal with. Typically, if you have your Dell support, even the basic one, I believe you are able to get a technician to come help with hardware repair/replacement.

Well, since this is a discussion about hardware, one would argue that ROI isn't really much of a relevant argument in this case, as the factors for it would depend more than just the actual server purchased. This is really a CAPEX expense, and given today's technology, and the business need and requirements, I personally would much rather start moving my computing resources to the cloud, (i.e: AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc...), and shift that CAPEX into an OPEX and free up some funds for more fluid cashflow.

I have worked very minimally with HP servers as well, which were also pretty good servers.

Reliability and manageability are valuable because since we run two separate sites, we can perform our maintenance and monitoring remotely (iDRAC), saving us travel time.

It allowed us to run more VMs than we had originally planned. We've had no failures in six years, and can perform remote management and maintenance.

This product has been superseded by newer model (R730) so any suggestions would be irrelevant. However, I am having a memory speed issue that I would like to be fixed.

I've been using it for six years, and are currently using the 2011 model..

We have had no issues with the deployment.

In the six years we have been using it, we have never had a fault/failure/malfunction hardware-wise.

Memory scalability and reduced memory speed when memory channels are fully populated. Then again, the model we have is six years old and our workloads/VMs have doubled.

We get great local support, and have always had positive experiences when speaking to Dell and using their products.

It was straightforward.

It was implemented by a systems integrator.

You should upgrade to, or get, Pro Support Plus. It is especially useful if your internal server/infrastructure team is small.

• Remote Management IDRAC
• Allows us to deploy & manage a server remotely
• It's very quiet

We have been using this server as a software license and a small file server for 10 users.

It would be nice to see an improvement in the performance.

We've used it for five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We haven't needed to scale it as we're only using it for 10 people.

We have not used Dell customer service.

We only used Dell support to download driver updates which is very flexible and very good.

We used other products, but Dell support offered more. We have less issues have a better understanding of the hardware design.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house.

The Xeon variants and large amount of RAM the server board supports is to our liking. Also the ease of which the machine can be upgraded. We had no difficulty with any hardware additions. Lastly, we enjoy the great warranty and quality of the product.

The ease of working with our suppliers and the availibility of the product.

I can't think of anything, as it is a good product.

We did not run into any problems.

We did not run into any problems.

We did not run into any problems.

It is a pricey server in comparison to its competitors, but it doesn’t lack in any of its capability. It still is great value for money and the product has great after sales support.

We chose Dell because it is a well-known brand and this was one of the buying factors for us. We find that trusted brands benefit not only our clients, but us as a reseller as well.