Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the Rack Servers category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.1, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell Technologies holds a 21.0% mindshare in Rack Servers, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 5.7% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Read 318 Dell PowerEdge R-Series reviews

25,013 Views
20,761 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

Read 25 HPE Apollo Systems reviews

3,294 Views
2,866 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

HPE Apollo Systems

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Dell PowerEdge R-Series and HPE Apollo Systems compete in the enterprise server category. Dell seems to have an edge in pricing and ROI due to its competitive and transparent pricing structure.

Features: Dell PowerEdge R-Series offers scalability, reliability, and intuitive management through iDRAC, with lifecycle management via OpenManage and robust security. HPE Apollo Systems excel in high-density storage and compute capacity for data-heavy applications and AI workloads, providing an adaptable environment with enhanced support for parallel processing.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerEdge R-Series could benefit from better pricing strategies, cleaner interfaces, and improved compatibility with external products. HPE Apollo Systems encounter high pricing challenges and limited scalability, which could improve with more flexible infrastructure integration and enhanced performance analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerEdge R-Series is versatile in deployment options, spanning private and hybrid clouds, with consistently high-rated technical support. HPE Apollo Systems benefit from strong on-premises deployments but have slightly lower customer support ratings and sometimes require improved communication in technical setups.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerEdge R-Series is recognized for its competitive pricing structure and clear licensing, resulting in cost savings and extended ROI. In contrast, HPE Apollo Systems are perceived as more expensive while still delivering solid investment returns in specific configurations like high-density storage.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 913,924 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Ranking in Rack Servers

1st

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

Converged Infrastructure (1st), Data Center Networking (3rd), Blade Servers (2nd)

HPE Apollo Systems

Ranking in Rack Servers

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Density Optimized Servers (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Rack Servers category, the mindshare of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is 21.0%, down from 27.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Apollo Systems is 5.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Rack Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerEdge R-Series	21.0%
HPE Apollo Systems	5.7%
Other	73.3%

Rack Servers

Featured Reviews

Tom van Mil

Systems Administrator at Lico Innovations B.v.

Supports flexible hosting needs through seamless upgradability and strong monitoring capabilities

The most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series for me are the feature richness and the upgradability. I really love the way that it is so dynamically applicable for every situation, and they manage to have an all-in-one solution for every single situation. Dell PowerEdge has supported the growth and operational success of my company through its great compute power and price-to-performance ratio. Every time Dell is at the top of its game for us, and there is just no other brand for us that is able to reach that kind of price-to-performance ratio. Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features that specifically cater to the needs of my small company, such as iDRAC. The iDRAC system is a complete feature set for managing servers and hardware technically and monitoring-wise. It really fits in our system and our ecosystem, and monitoring-wise, it is excellent. They have all these sensors available via different protocols and end points, which I love, and the ability to manage and control everything via the iDRAC interface is just a welcome bonus. In our use case, Dell PowerEdge R-Series is very flexible. It is another computer which helps a lot because of the durability over time. They keep running, making scalability for getting more of those resources in our environment so easy.

Read full review

Gökhan DURMAZ

Account Manager at TD SYNNEX

High-quality integration and strong support have optimized our rack server operations

HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity. When I speak about integrity, I speak about GPU integration or other integrations such as GPU integration, backup software integration, and hypervisor integration. Regarding the integration of high-speed interconnectors in HPE Apollo Systems, they impact computational tasks because the high-speed interconnect affects performance. I don't remember the specifics. Regarding the cooling technologies, they help to reduce operational costs. The positive impact I see from HPE Apollo Systems is that support is good and quality is good. In general, HPE Apollo Systems appears to be for rack servers with some optimization capabilities.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Overall, I've seen an improvement in the network bandwidth, as well as an improvement in the speed of the blades and the processors."

"Ease of use."

"I find the flexibility of the build-out in Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers very valuable because we can do different things based on the use case. This flexibility is highlighted by being able to reduce CPU count, RAM count, and the number of drives depending on the site's importance."

"Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped reduce our downtime by a lot."

"Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series has helped reduce unplanned production downtime because I find that Dell servers, as a whole, are very reliable given that we have several other products from Dell that we use, not only the PowerEdge."

"The PowerEdge systems management frameworks have enabled us to progress towards full automation when it comes to managing PowerEdge."

"PowerEdge is able to run the latest high-demand applications for our use case; they host our clusters and facilitate the building of environments, and we also like the iDRAC feature for monitoring system data and providing analytics."

"The solutions accelerated GPUs have helped to support demanding workloads and to reduce data processing time in our organization."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series pros

"We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it, as it satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution."

"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."

"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable. It is quite effective for the work for which we are using it. We are mainly running video servers on these, and we are quite happy with the resilience, density storage, and streaming capacity of the system."

"HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature."

"For us, the most valuable features are the price and density."

"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable."

"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"

"HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

Cons

"The pricing structure could be improved."

"Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved, especially the upgrade, the swapping, and the hot-swappable disk and hot-swappable feature can enhance the day-two operations and the replacement and maintenance activities."

"One of the things that I've noticed is that over time, the system degrades, meaning that little things don't work. For example, the hard drive would need to be replaced or iDRAC would not be functioning properly. We may have to flash the firmware. It is not like some other hardware where it just runs without issues for four or five years. With Dell, generally, there are little hiccups here and there."

"We are expecting that the price of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is quite higher than others."

"Power consumption is probably on everyone's top of mind regarding Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; they use a lot of power and create a lot of heat. Also, the noise levels are pretty high, though I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done about it."

"When trying to piece out a server for our builds, there are so many different SKUs—probably 30 to 40 SKUs—that it can be difficult to read. If that could be condensed a little bit, that would help."

"They could improve the time between new versions of the product."

"We have a cloud-first strategy, and hardware is starting to become more and more secondary, so we are not betting on it."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series cons

"The licensing could be greatly improved, I think."

"We could, perhaps, use more GPUs in the future, go from eight to 16 GPUs per instance. That could run head-to-head against the DGX-1, the DGX-2 that NVIDIA has developed in their own chassis. That would be interesting to see."

"I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second - that would be outstanding."

"If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo."

"We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo."

"We are struggling a little bit with some of the configuration we need to do, particularly with write capability to drives."

"HPE Apollo Systems is a bit expensive, and there are some issues with scalability."

"The solution's deployment, security, and scalability need improvement."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a bit of a shock when you have to find the money, but the pricing is very competitive, so I'm happy with that."

"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."

"When you compare public cloud solutions to PowerEdge in terms of cost, initially the cost of Dell servers or Dell technology was really high. However, right now it's on par or, maybe, even cheaper when we use Dell hardware. If we don't swap it out in three years and if we stretch it to four or five years, then we can get even more of an ROI versus cloud cost."

"If price isn't a concern, I would recommend it."

"There is room for improvement in making it more cost-effective."

"This solution is reasonably priced and licenses are easy to acquire."

"Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers are very expensive."

"The solution's prices are good, especially considering what you get to use...The licensing aspect of the solution is also fine."

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series pricing and cost advice

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."

"The price of the solution is more expensive than Dell which is their main competitor. However, there are times we have managed to receive a comparable price."

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."

"It is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. The standard licensing cost is for the GPU and the features that someone is using. There are additional charges but they depend on the solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	112
Midsize Enterprise	66
Large Enterprise	138

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

When shopping for a rack server, would you go with Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem rack servers were the better fit for us. We ultimately decided to go with Dell EMC Poweredge....

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

Unplanned production downtime is a concern. According to our experience, when we run a high workload to a certain level, for example, more than 80% or up to 90%, the system does not perform well. T...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

We run multiple workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, including database and virtual machine workloads. Some of our multi-purpose VM workloads are running databases such as Mongo or Oracle. We serv...

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Apollo?

It is too early to say what improvements HPE Apollo Systems could implement because the report still needs to come out and the customer needs to properly evaluate the solution.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HPE Apollo?

My main use case for HPE Apollo Systems is replacing many of the servers and storage boxes at one of the customer's sites to achieve workload optimization and optimized solutions. Additionally, whe...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering HPE Apollo?

My advice for someone considering HPE Apollo Systems is that if they are looking for consolidation and their workload involves high availability requirements, or if they want to utilize GPUs, then ...

See all answers

Comparisons

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 32% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei FusionServer RH Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 4% of the time

HPE Synergy vs Dell PowerEdge R-Series

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerEdge R-Series Competitors

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Moonshot vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

Lenovo High-Density Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 6% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series

September 2026

Download Dell PowerEdge R-Series product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Also Known As

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo

Overview

PowerEdge R-Series delivers high performance, flexibility, and scalability for data centers. It supports demanding tasks with robust management tools and advanced cooling, providing reliability and efficiency across various workloads.

Engineered for large deployments, PowerEdge R-Series supports extensive configurations optimizing performance in data centers. With features like advanced cooling and energy-efficient architecture, it empowers organizations to manage heavy workloads while facilitating seamless scalability. It offers remote management, robust security, and integration with VMware ensuring operational excellence and high availability for business-critical applications.

What are the key features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series?

Scalability: Supports flexible configurations for diverse workloads.
Remote Management: iDRAC and OpenManage facilitate easy oversight.
Energy Efficiency: Architecture helps reduce energy consumption.
Security: Robust features ensure protected performance.
VMware Integration: Enhances manageability and productivity.

What benefits and ROI should you look for?

Performance: Handles high-performance and demanding tasks.
Flexibility: Offers easily upgradable configurations.
Reliability: Provides consistent performance with long-term support.
Efficiency: Reduces energy use and operational costs.
Ease of Use: Simplifies management and maintenance.

PowerEdge R-Series is deployed across industries for virtualization, database hosting, and application servers. It supports environments like VMware and Hyper-V for AI, cloud infrastructure, and computing tasks. Widely used by finance, healthcare, and academia, it enhances reliability and efficiency of IT infrastructure.

Dell Technologies

HPE Apollo Systems deliver high compute and storage density, scalability, and environmental efficiency with exceptional performance for AI initiatives and data capturing across diverse applications.

HPE Apollo Systems are characterized by their dense compute and storage capabilities, offering flexibility in configurations to meet the demands of AI, deep learning, and high-performance computing. Their management software simplifies deployment, ensuring effective performance across tasks that require significant storage. While Apollo Systems are designed for efficiency and scalability, improvements can be made in security, tech support, and integration with hypervisors and backup solutions. Enhancing cooling and licensing processes, connectivity, and faster drive writing capabilities are also areas for growth.

What are the key features of HPE Apollo Systems?

High Compute Density: Supports intense processing needs efficiently.
Scalability: Easily adaptable to growing data demands.
Environmental Efficiency: Minimizes energy consumption, enhancing sustainability.
Flexible Configurations: Caters to a range of applications from AI to data storage.
Reliable Performance: Consistently delivers under various workloads.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Effectiveness: Reduces expenditure with its efficient design.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly fits into diverse IT environments.
Performance Enhancement: Boosts operational efficiency and output.
Easy Deployment: Streamlines the setup process for quick operation.

HPE Apollo Systems find extensive use in sectors such as telecom, supporting high-performance computing and AI workloads. They optimize Linux servers, replace legacy systems, and serve as storage solutions across industries. Their applications span from big data management in Splunk clusters to backup solutions in medical faculties, enhancing compute power and storage within compact racks.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco

Weta Digital

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Free Report: Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs. HPE Apollo Systems

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