Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

My main use case for it is a server.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is rackable, which is the feature I like the most about it.That rackable feature benefits my company at the end of the day because it is easy to ship racks all over the world.Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features that specifically cater to the needs of small-medium organizations, which stands out for Dell versus our competitors. They have a slightly nicer model for managing maintenance of BIOS upgrades and RAID upgrades, and I find it always really easy to get their serial number off the Dell iDRAC code.Dell PowerEdge R-Series has supported growth or operational success for my company because good servers sell good software.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved; some of the chassis could use a redesign, though I have older chassis, so I should go check their new models.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for a year and a half.

I have experienced some downtime or crashes, but we are at scale, and nothing is outside of the average normally.

I see Dell products growing with our future needs. We are horizontally scalable, so it is just the number of machines that we buy.

My thoughts on the customer service and technical support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are that it is good; 10 would be perfect, so I rate it nine.

I did use something similar to Dell PowerEdge R-Series before choosing this solution.

The deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series has been straightforward.

The return on investment for me specifically is good maintenance or a good lifecycle, which I see as the biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series.The lifecycle has been expanded because it is useful to use the older hardware that we have decommissioned for new use cases; they do not go immediately into e-waste. We are actually using them in other areas for things that we had not even developed a few years ago, so they have been well past their lifecycle, but it is still beneficial.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been acceptable, with no complaints.

I have considered switching to other solutions that do the same as Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not play a role in my company's AI initiatives, and I do not see it being able to do that someday as well.I do use an Intel processor with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. The Intel processor handles my workloads well compared to what I expected. I do not have a comment on any specific pieces of the Intel processor, but it does have high compute density and good memory bandwidth.I have evaluated other systems powered by other CPU vendors. I do not have a comment on what stands out with Intel. I do not have a comment on the differences or why I switched to Dell PowerEdge R-Series.I have no advice to offer to other companies that are considering this solution. I give this solution an overall rating of nine.

On-premises

As the Head of IT, I am involved in working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

My hands-on experience with Dell PowerEdge R-Series is complemented by my team that works with it, and I purchase and design the whole infrastructure.

Our entire infrastructure runs on Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Since I have not known anything else for nine years, I do not know if Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features that are specifically tailored to the needs of small or medium-sized enterprises.

The feature I find particularly valuable in Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the service.

What differentiates Dell PowerEdge R-Series from other servers is the service.

In areas where Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved, it is difficult to say, but for the most part, this is always a five out of five, especially regarding service and response times, which are already quite high.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series in the data center for about nine years, and this model is now in its third year.

Regarding failures, performance, and downtime, I experience no issues.

Speaking of stability and reliability, there have been no crashes, outages, or performance issues.

For my company's long-term plans, I switched to the APEX model, and that is very scalable.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate the support a ten.

For that, I have four-hour mission critical service, and that works, although I must say it is a pity, as I would have liked a bit more negative feedback to provide.

Positive

I had other solutions before, specifically IBM and Lenovo.

I removed IBM and Lenovo because they were bad in comparison.

There were specific reasons for switching, namely the licensing policy; in the end, for every tiny thing, I still had to buy an extra license.

With Dell PowerEdge R-Series, everything is simpler, much simpler.

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup of Dell PowerEdge R-Series the whole time.

Everything went smoothly during the setup; it was actually relatively easy.

Regarding return on investment, that was nine years ago, and it was definitely positive, otherwise I would not have done it.

The model I am using is Dell PowerEdge R-Series, specifically the PowerEdge 650 AX.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series plays a role in my future plans as well, but that is still coming.

What is still coming is my consideration of offering local AI as well, but for that, I still have to negotiate with Dell Sales to see if I can get a proof of concept beforehand.

The size of my company is hard to define; I am an internal IT service provider for affiliated companies, so we are a larger group and mid-sized.

Regarding whether I have over five hundred employees, I actually have under five hundred.

I am currently interested in smaller and medium-sized companies and would like to know whether Dell PowerEdge R-Series can or has significantly contributed to growth or business success, and it has, of course.

A concrete example where Dell PowerEdge R-Series has noticeably improved my business operations would be more in the client segment, so fewer servers and more on the user side, which means the rollout via Autopilot and Dell is a bit easier, but for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I would not really know of a specific example.

Pricing is reasonable, as I already stated, and I did have other solutions before, specifically IBM and Lenovo.

Regarding product purchase via the AWS Marketplace, that is a good question; I do not even know how it was with APEX, as that was a bit more effort because Dell Financials was also involved, but I did all of that through Sales.

I am still considering whether to become a Dell customer or an MSP, but at the moment I prefer to be a customer.

I would give this review an overall rating of ten out of ten.

On-premises

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is primarily used for storage in my organization, mostly for web application data and databases.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has positively impacted my organization by helping us solve the business cases for our business requirements. It has addressed our complex business requirements that arose because applications were distributed amongst different data centers.

This solution has helped us centralize and manage everything properly and effectively.

The best features that Dell PowerEdge R-Series offers are that it provides a very stable environment and requires a much smaller number of people to support it.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series meets all our requirements, so I don't have a wish list for improvement. I chose a rating of nine instead of ten because there is always room for improvements in technology.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for three years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is stable in my experience.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series meets our growth requirements in terms of scalability.

The customer support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is excellent, and we have no problems with it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.

Positive

We did not use any other solution before Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has definitely simplified the deployment process and has been a great implementation, making a noticeable impact on my business operations.

I oversee the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series and also design the monitoring solutions for Dell products.

We have not calculated a return on investment for this solution.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerEdge R-Series was very positive and great, and it worked out very well.

We did not evaluate any other option before choosing Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not play a role in my organization's AI initiatives. We don't have any specific metrics to measure success with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. I am using standard R-Series rack servers.

I would highly recommend Dell PowerEdge R-Series as it is a basic but an excellent solution for anyone looking into this product. I provided this review a rating of nine out of ten.

On-premises

We are primarily using it for test development environments. We have VMs hosted on them, and we use them to run our internal applications, customer environments, dev setup, common projects, the development environment, and the UAT environment in the service.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty good at handling diverse applications. We get good performance from it. 

We have a lot of VMs on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. On a single server, we have probably hosted 14 or 15 VMs. Out of these, 8 to 10 are continuously running, and four of them are backup VMs, so it can handle a good workload.

For cybersecurity, it is only accessible on the intranet; it is not accessible through the web. We use it for local development purposes, and it is behind our firewall. Its security is strong. We handle a lot of test data for government and confidential customers. It is safe and strong locally. We have not experienced any security issues.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime if we need to replace a hard disk, instead of completely shutting a server, there is a hot swap feature. It is quite good in that aspect. Usually, for any activity, there is a downtime of about 30 minutes. It has saved a lot of time.

We have tried AI workloads for a development environment for a government customer in Singapore. The servers are hosted in Singapore. It is an ML-based engine with AI. It is a government project where data is processed, and we run it on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The benefit of running AI workloads on PowerEdge Servers is that it is easy to allocate memory. The application we are running is memory intensive. It is pretty easy to scale memory and storage.

We have been using these servers for eight years. We have experienced good performance with them. 

Dell PowerEdge's strength is that they have a lot of NIC cards, so we can set up web apps and everything else for development on a single server. We can easily replace hard disks which is quite good.

I have used these servers in a government project along with Nutanix, and there is a security restriction. I do not know if it is from Dell's side or Nutanix's side. From the host, you cannot read the external hard drive data inside a VM. They have a security restriction on it. I understand the security restriction, but there should be a policy where you can do it during the development stages and copy data. After it goes to production, the policy should be implemented, and the port should be closed.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for seven to eight years.

I have not experienced any stability issues. The number of years we have been using these servers shows their reliability. 

For a government project, I went from five nodes to eight nodes, and it was pretty easy to scale up.

We did not directly go to Dell support because we were going through Nutanix. From what I have heard, I would rate Dell support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The setup is easy. Management-wise also, it is pretty easy. We normally remote in from our lab. It is convenient and easy.

We partnered with Nutanix for this government project. They set up the base hardware infrastructure configurations. We built our VM applications on top of that. We had a couple of challenges. Data migration was a big challenge because of the sensitivity of the data. I had to sit inside the data center for twelve hours continuously because we had to take a different approach to transferring data. We could not directly transfer that data from the physical port into a VM. They told us that it was a security restriction that could not be relaxed at all. There should be an option when you migrate large data sets.

I cannot put a number to ROI because it is more of a development environment set up for us, not a production environment. The production environment using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is managed by the government entity itself. We are an application service provider and system integrator. We integrate our custom-built applications or COTS applications into the government infrastructure. Cost-wise, for the physical hardware, we cannot give an estimate because the data we use for development is small in the test environment.

From the fulfillment aspect, the government has a big set of data centers. Most of them have Dell EMC servers. We use the similar, if not the same, hardware to do our development tasks.

We evaluated a Lenovo IBM server seven or eight years ago. We chose Dell PowerEdge because of the storage aspect. We got a better storage and RAM option here, so we moved to Dell.

In terms of our AI journey, we are an IT system integrator. We have built our own IoT platform. We have integrated AI into our IoT platform, and we also have partnered with another PC manufacturer for whom we have been testing hardware devices for the past 20 years or so. We have qualified their AI solutions on their devices.

Everything has a cost, but we have to see the benefits over a longer period of time and its effect on our operations and ultimately customer satisfaction. I do not look at the cost only from a financial perspective; I have to look at it from different angles. This helps ensure that it does not create problems for our customers and that the customer is satisfied. 

I would recommend focusing on performance and reliability rather than just cost.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers very high because we have been able to set up different environments in different VLANs and connect to all of them at the same time. Overall, I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are working with both on-premises and cloud-based versions of Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We are also using it for HCI and VDI, as different customers have their own scenario-based solutions.

Both public and private cloud options are optimized for Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We have different scenarios for the government sector and the private sector and from our SMB clients.

We have different scenario-based clients and scenario-based solutions for Dell PowerEdge R-Series, such as HPC and small-medium business solutions for their business continuity, for the application purpose, and for the HCI. For different workloads, they have different products. Once we receive the requirements through emails, we are designing the solutions according to the client requirements.

We have many clients and different types of workloads we are using in different clients on Dell PowerEdge servers. One of our clients is using a database, one of our clients is HPC, and one of our clients is using a virtualization workload. They have a different virtualization environment in their data center.

The best feature of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is not just one aspect. The entire product is very robust. We have been using it for many years and we are receiving lots of positive feedback from our customers. Dell has their own architecture and they have the latest generation. If the server is 15th generation, they have the latest type of iDRAC, Enterprise Plus, and Pro Plus. They have different and great features in their built-in servers.

We are the largest partner of Dell, so we are using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for many years. It has been almost 10 to 15 years we have been using it and we have been pitching it to our clients.

For future updates of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we are expecting more AI technologies built-in. Dell already has their AI servers, so we are expecting something similar to this. This is the trending technology in the world.

We are expecting that the price of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is quite higher than others. We are expecting that Dell should have some price reliability.

We are the largest partner of Dell, so we are using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for many years. It has been almost 10 to 15 years we have been using it and we have been pitching it to our clients.

We have not faced any issues right now for Dell PowerEdge R-Series. All products have some weak points, but we do not have any right now.

We are giving the support and technical support for Dell PowerEdge R-Series a 10 because the Dell support team is very intellectual and very robust. They are responding on time. Their call logging system is very unique and very good. Once you are logging the case in their portal, at the same time they are generating the case number and they will send you the email with all the details.

Positive

It takes some time to install or deploy Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but not more than enough time. Once we procure the equipment, it is almost taking 30 minutes to 40 minutes for the configuration and for the deployment if the rack is ready. It is very easy.

We are using Dell products, Dell PowerEdge, HPE, and maybe Lenovo, as well as some other solutions. We officially rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series a 10.

I use the solution primarily for software-defined networking, and there are some AI workloads present as well. We started last year, but previously, it was mostly about software-defined networking and private clouds. We mainly used OpenStack. These are the main use cases I run with PowerEdge.

It's quite good at handling diverse applications. I don't have any complaints about that. It's very smooth.

We have not experienced any security incidents or vulnerabilities with PowerEdge Servers.

Dell PowerEdge has reduced operational overheads in terms of support and operations build.

I am a fan of its ability to handle the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. It's very demanding. I mostly use it with a CPU load of nearly eighty to ninety percent, with workloads where we take the maximum output from the servers on the cloud. It has been sustainable and reliable in terms of compute.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped reduce our downtime by a lot. The production downtimes are mostly planned. My system is designed in a resilient way, but with PowerEdge Servers, I don't need a one-to-one ratio redundancy, which leads to about eighty percent downtime reduction. It has also reduced operational overheads related to support and operations.

I like that it is stable. Things become very difficult over time when you increase the security. In Dell's case, it is very stable, and I like that it's very process-oriented.

The security is on par to the global standard. We always get market standard security. Upgrades run smoothly and seemlessly.

Their biggest strength is their stability under heavy workloads and their long term reliability. I don't think they have any weaknesses. 

The solution can be improved in terms of firmware backward supportability. With the sixteenth generation servers I am using, slightly older kernels and drivers are not supported. I have to use the latest OS because the drivers and particular support are not there. 

The rack port supportability for the latest PowerEdge servers is not great. Until the fourteenth generation, I never faced this issue. From the fifteenth and sixteenth generations, this issue has started occurring. 

These servers are not very adaptive to the multiple GPU model. I can insert at most two GPUs. While the Dell server in terms of compute is capable of handling multiples, the physical design does not allow more in terms of placement space.

I have used the solution for the last six years.

The stability is quite good. I have no complaints about it as it is very smooth.

The scalability of the solution is very easy. The process is seamless.

The customer service was good in certain aspects, but I mostly had services where things became complex because of the software-defined networking applications. They use things differently, so I have to consult first and make arrangements. Designing and all those parts take time, so customer service can be improved in terms of timing.

Positive

I have used Cisco, HP, and Supermicro in the past. PowerEdge was not originally selected for stability and hardware compatibility,

We use Dell deployment services for the storage solutions, not for PowerEdge.

There is a return on investment because I have been using them for the last four or five years. ROI is there, but it's a complex assessment when considering the return on investment from the hardware. It's part of a complete solution where I would assess this aspect.

The total cost of ownership for support and operations has reduced significantly. In terms of stability, I seldom encounter support cases or operational costs. They have been stable and running for years without performance downtime or significant disc failures, providing me an edge in operational and support costs.

My advice to anybody considering Dell PowerEdge is to check the new ranges which are more adaptive towards AI. The R750 and R760 are general-purpose servers, so they need to look into AI-specific servers where more GPUs can be incorporated. On PowerEdge Servers specifically, the benefits are clear. I would rate them nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Other

Our primary use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is to deliver robust, scalable infrastructure solutions tailored for virtualization, private cloud and AI-driven workloads.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have been a cornerstone of our infrastructure portfolio, allowing us to enhance service quality, increase business agility and expand our enterprise client base with confidence.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, from our perspective as an enterprise solution provider, include:

iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller)

Scalability & Modular Design

OpenManage Enterprise Suite

Security Features

High Efficiency Power & Thermal Design

ProSupport & Deployment Services

These features collectively enable us to deliver high-availability, cost-efficient and secure solutions that meet diverse customer demands, from SMBs to large enterprises.

While Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are among the most reliable and versatile in the market, there are a few areas where improvements and feature additions could further enhance their value:

Areas for Improvement
Firmware Update Coordination
Enhanced GPU & AI Workload Support in Mid-range Models
Noise Levels in Smaller Environments
Greater Native Support for Open-Source Tools

Suggested Features for Future Releases
AI-Powered Predictive Maintenance
Edge-Optimized Models with Compact Form Factor
Improved Integration with Multi-Cloud Platforms

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are enterprise-grade and trusted, but continued focus on edge workloads, open-source compatibility and smarter automation features will help Dell stay ahead in a rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape.

As a Dell Technologies Partner and Enterprise Solution Provider, we have been working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for over a decade. Throughout this period, we’ve deployed, configured and supported PowerEdge solutions across a wide range of industry verticals including government, finance, healthcare, education, and manufacturing.

On-premises

We are running VMware vSphere and regular Windows servers. We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for server implementation, virtualization, storage, so basically virtualization and server support.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. They have also helped to reduce the consumption of energy. We have seen decreased consumption levels through our monitoring systems. The cooling system has been significantly improved in the newer versions and models of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

The optimization of hardware and the ability to extend the hardware are valued features.

Pricing might be an area for improvement. There is competition, and lowering prices could be beneficial.

We have been using it for at least ten years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have managed to reduce the consumption of energy. We have seen that in the levels of our monitoring systems, which definitely show a decrease in consumption.

I've contacted them many times. The overall support is very good with first-class service.

Positive

We are using Pure Storage—the flash drives from Pure Storage.

It was easy. 

At the end, the cost benefit will be greater than the original investments. We just implemented the solution in our Mexico City offices. This is the first month for the actual payment. The benefit in the long run financially is structured so the company does not decapitalize. In the three or five years, we will have the newer equipment once the leasing is over or is renewed.

We are at the initial stage in our AI journey as a multinational level company. We are still working on testing, but it hasn't been totally implemented yet. We have done some automation with Python and are trying to use CoPilot for small tasks, but it hasn't been developed to a large scale. We are still in progress at this point.

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