Dell XR2 Rugged Server Reviews

What is our primary use case?

We are customers of Dell and I'm the CEO of the company. 

What is most valuable?

The storage and the disc performance in terms of IOPS is great because of the RAID card which is built-in. The other valuable element of the product is the GPU compatibility which provides us with great graphical performance in the virtual desktops. That aspect is usually a challenge in other solutions. 

What needs improvement?

One of our issues is that we currently have an eight-bay system. I'd like to migrate to a 16-bay system, but there isn't a modular option available. I'd also like to see upgrade options on the storage cards, which would be helpful. In terms of additional features, I think options for improving cryptographic performance would be great. It may not be a global end-user requirement, but that's something that we would expect to see.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for over five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable, we haven't had any downtime in five years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable to a degree but now we feel the need to scale to 16 bays which means we also need the storage RAID controller to be scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is excellent, including the remote support. The Dell support team utilizes some really good sophisticated tools to provide remote support. We sometimes required their help to configure and understand certain parameters to fine tune the performance.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing costs are reasonable and that's part of the reason I went with Dell. The cost was around 40% less than what we were offered by the resellers. 

What other advice do I have?

My recommendation would be to go through the complete server configuration documents and the manual. Ascertain clearly your use case and from there you can really leverage the performance and scalability benefits. I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud