Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

We are in the aerospace industry. We use the servers in a security-type production.

It improved our management and the product manager's life. The product is a bit complicated but it does the job.

The lightness, automation, and the automatic process that it performs without too many interventions are good. It's just plug-and-play.

In terms of PowerEdge's cyber-resilient architecture approach to security, since the product is on-prem, it is very protected.

PowerEdge Servers helped to reduce unplanned production downtime because of the configuration of our product, it is active-active. It has 99% high reliability. 

So far, we haven't thought of anything that could be improved in the product.

In terms of energy use, it takes up a lot. I wouldn't say it's economical, compared to other products. It's not as economical as HP. NetApp, for example, is 2800 against 800, and Dell is almost three times more massive.

The product is stable.

Scalability is easy and convenient. The product enables us to be more productive and flexible.

I give the support a 10 out of 10. The people are a 10 but I´ll give the waiting time that it takes to get to the technical support and the people an eight.

In the past we used other products that were not Dell, they were both very durable. Dell is on another level.

I use Dell's professional services during failures and upgrades mainly. The service is excellent.

I did not deploy the product because the company asked to bring in an external professional service to do the installations. My experience with them was pretty straightforward.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for computing. We use PowerEdge for all of the laboratories for all of the computer science labs. 

We implemented PowerEdge to improve our flexibility and power. 

We need a lot of computing power, and PowerEdge provides a balance between price, power, and storage. It improved our flexibility by enabling us to add more servers to the clusters. When you replace servers, there is no downtime. The most important aspect is that there is almost zero downtime. 

I reconfigure servers and explain them to the IT office as code when I handle them. The ability to manage all the servers from one console is beneficial because I'm managing hundreds of them from one place. It saves us hundreds of hours a year in time. 

PowerEdge Dell to reduce unplanned production downtime to almost zero.

Hyperscale is the most valuable feature. I like how I can stack many servers on top of each other, and they work like a cloud.

I would like for there to be more disc space.

We have used PowerEdge for 10 years.

PowerEdge servers are highly stable. 

It's easy to add more servers to the cluster. 

I rate Dell support 10 out of 10. They give me the answers I need, not just what I want. 

Positive

We used to work with some very old HP machines. We got quotes from various vendors, but Dell gave us the best performance for a good price. 

Deploying PowerEdge servers is straightforward. It takes about 15 minutes, including installation and reconfiguration. We use Unix and Linux, so it's quick. 

Although PowerEdge's price is high, it's easier to handle, and there's no downtime. In my opinion, it's worth the price.

I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers 10 out of 10.

We use the PowerEdge Rack Server T150 in a small business. I look after a chain of dental practices in the UK and these are fantastic boxes for each one of our branch offices. Every practice is going to have one of these T150 servers installed. 

The T150 server acts as the main controller, our central authentication server for ensuring security on the network. We also use it for file and print services over SMB, and for bespoke applications for the dental world such as SOE or R4. They run on Windows Server 2022, which came pre-packaged with the T150 server.

These servers have maintained a level of uptime that is needed by the business and that satisfies the business owners and makes them very happy. It has managed 100 percent uptime and I wouldn't expect any less. That's the reliability of the T150s. The cost-to-reliability ratio is impressive.

We like the iDRAC card which gives us remote access to the server out of band. That's fantastic because if a box is misbehaving, I'm able to get into the bare metal and repair the operating system without needing to go out to the branch office, which could be anywhere in the UK. That's one of the features which we really like in the PowerEdge T150 server.

In addition, it's all in one box. It has 

• fault tolerance built-in 
• RAID 1 sets
• dual power supplies. 

I need a reliable box. If there is a power supply failure or a drive failure, I'm able to rectify that problem without visiting the customer. And if it's a more serious event, I've got iDRAC so that I can get into it. 

The box comes pre-installed with Windows Server 2022, which was one of the reasons we purchased the T150. The licensing was bundled with it, and it has a very attractive price point as a result. But with Windows Server 2022 sitting on the box, the applications interface with that. The applications we run don't talk to the Dell hardware.

Within the native-OS security features, we encrypt the OS disks and that has increased security.

The solution hasn't helped to reduce unplanned production downtime for us, but I know it can do so. It has what HPE calls Automatic System Recovery. Dell calls it the Watchdog Timer. I haven't had a blue screen or system hang yet, but I'm aware that if the system OS freezes, then the Dell Watchdog Timer built into the T150 will automatically restart the server. In that scenario, it would most certainly help with uptime by recovering from an operating system freeze. The T150 certainly ticks that box. I haven't had to see it in action yet, but the technology is there and it is enabled, and the business is happy with that.

A lot of the features of the PowerEdge 650s cascade down to the T150, which is great.

The T150 is a little bit bulky for what it is. I think if they created a T150 version with small form-factor drives, that would be an ideal solution. Currently, it is a tower box and it has quite a big footprint, and I have a couple of drives in it—a RAID 1 with a couple of terabytes, SSDs. The footprint of the box is pretty enormous. It has eight large form-factor drives. Gone are the days of people having large spinning disks.

A smaller, all-flash T150 model with 2.5-inch drives would certainly make it a little bit smaller with the potential for power supplies to not be so big. A general shrinkage of the footprint and noise would be good. That's not to say that it's a problem, but that could make it better.

I've been using PowerEdge servers from Dell for about eight years, but we purchased the T150 server just a few weeks ago.

I haven't ever had a fault on a Dell server. I've never had to call out a Dell engineer to fix a fault on a Dell PowerEdge Server. I may only have 10 boxes and if someone else has 100, it might be a different story, but I can only speak from my experience. 

I have had issues with Dell laptops and consumer items, but I have never had a fault on data center products, small business servers, or network switches. I'm very impressed. On the consumer electronics side, I don't think they're anywhere near as robust, and perhaps they could learn a lesson from the enterprise side.

The stability is a 10 out of 10. PowerEdge Rack Servers are rock-solid. I don't have a bad word about it because I haven't had a fault.

I wouldn't have a T150 if I had been looking for scalability. I'd have a dual or quad box where I could add an additional processor and scale it as and when needed. I can add more disk, but the days of ripping out an Intel Silver processor and dropping in an Intel Gold processor are gone. It's not cost-effective anymore to do that.

The bulk of my experience with Dell tech support is on the consumer side of things.

I've used quite a few systems throughout the years. I've just recently bought a couple of R650xs boxes and they're ticking along extremely well.

We worked with Dell and sized the box accordingly. With the budget that we had, chose the T150 based on its price-performance ratio. This isn't a box that's going to be running SQL Databases with 10 billion rows. It's not pitched at that level. But this box does perfectly well for our branch offices, Active Directory services, file and print services, application servers, and small web-server management systems. It's a perfect candidate for this role.

The deployment was very straightforward. The T150 came pre-installed with Windows Server 2022, out-of-the-box. Everything was there, including the drivers. It was perfect. There was just a very small custom setup of the Microsoft part. But out-of-the-box, I turned it on and it just worked. They keep it simple. It was seamless, a turnkey solution, for a Windows Server OS install.

I'm also an HPE guy. At the end of the day, they run the same processes. They still run the same basics onboard. They've still got the same NVMe chipsets. Whether you're buying a flash drive from HPE or Dell, it is going to be the same KIOXIA or Seagate.

The question is, what are you actually paying for? You're paying for Dell's custom firmware that sits on top of the box. Dell doesn't produce their own motherboards or processors. 

The main reason I choose Dell there is cost. Dell is cheaper than HPE. Why would I want to pay a premium for an HPE product when I'm getting the same amount of support, the same amount of data protection, and the same amount of performance from Dell? It's a no-brainer. I can get a Dell system for about 20 percent less than an HPE system, with exactly the same performance, level of support, and reliability.

And in terms of the possibility of going with a public cloud server, the software for this customer isn't available in the cloud. It's only an on-premises installation.

For high-performance workloads, I wouldn't run the T150 server. I would look at a dual-processor box like the 440 for high-performance workloads. The applications that we run on the T150s do have a small, backend SQL Database and I have no issues with running that on them, but I'm not going to run my main web servers, with tens of thousands of clients connected to it, on a T150. High-performance workloads are not the T150's market.

In terms of the T150's security features, fortunately, I've never had to use the BIOS recovery. It's been pretty rock-solid, and that's a credit to Dell. What I do like is the ability to do all of the firmware updates in the rack. What's beautiful about that is that you have a manual or automatic option. I don't use the automatic, but the option is there if I wanted to use it. I don't want to have 40 machines all rebooting at the same time, at 2:00 AM, on a Sunday morning, because a firmware update has been released, and find that none of them come back online. That would be bad IT management. For that reason, I don't use automatic patching. 

I use the manual method, which works very well. It goes out to the internet and tells you what needs to be updated. I click the boxes and schedule the next reboot with Microsoft Patch Tuesday, on the second Tuesday of every month. I review the updates to see what is needed and if it's needed. And typically, I'll apply them on the next weekend, unless something is critical. The rack will then do its firmware updates at the same time.

I haven't monitored the energy consumption of PowerEdge servers. The rack does have energy consumption statistics built into it, but I haven't looked at them, with just a single box running at each site. If I was running them in a data center and I had 40 in the same place, yes, it would be extremely useful to report on. But just having a single box, it's not that important.

Although I haven't really had too much experience with the PowerEdge Rack Server 150 yet, it has done everything I've asked it to do. It's doing what a computer does. It's faultless. I give it 10 out of 10.

We do web hosting. Our web hosting servers, database servers, corporate cluster, and backup cluster are on Dell servers.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are pretty good in terms of energy consumption. Ours are pretty power-hungry, but we load them up with hard drives and CPUs, and they drink power. It is not Dell's fault. The power efficiency or the power supply is excellent. They are on par or better than the rest we used.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are excellent for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. We have put in platinums and many CPUs in it, and being able to get those in one form or two form factors is incredibly useful. It allows us to deliver as much power as we want without having to get the massive four and six RUs.

Having four-hour support is very handy. Having someone out there within four hours if something dies has been very handy.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have affected the overall flexibility of our operations or business because we run very similar servers throughout our entire config so that we can be flexible. We do not have to go buy specific hardware. We can use one hardware to do all the jobs.

Consistency and reliability are valuable. They provide good support for part replacement, and when they cannot because the part is unavailable, they are pretty good at informing us and letting us know, but generally, these servers just sit in the data center and have been working 24/7 for years without any problems.

They are less temperamental with temperature. We have had some other providers whose servers would overheat even though they are in the same data center with the same specs as Dell, which did not overheat.

My biggest grievance is related to getting a caddy. We have decommissioned our old servers that we used for development or testing. You cannot buy hard drives for old servers from Dell. It is very annoying.

We tried the OpenManage console. We ran it up on a server with about 50 tracks going to it, and it kept crashing.

Another room for improvement is better OpenBMC implementation. I know Dell is getting into it now, but we do run multiple vendors for various reasons. Being able to have everyone in one would be great. Dell was the one who was missing from the party, and I do believe they have signed to implement it now. 

We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for ten years.

They are very stable.

They are not scalable, but they are not meant to be. They are perfect for their role. If you want scalability, you should be using blade servers.

We are mostly using Dell R730, R740, and R750 because we have some old ones.

I would rate them a seven out of ten. I find that when I put in a ticket, they come back and ask me questions that I have already answered, or because I am dealing with level 1, they make suggestions that are absolutely irrelevant, and they waste my time dealing with it. 

I understand that they do have people who have no idea what they are doing call up, and they need to test these basic things, but it is very frustrating. There is no way to prove I am competent to skip level 1. 

Neutral

We are using HPE. We had Supermicro, but we were having issues, so we got rid of those. We looked at Gigabyte and SUSE, but they were a lot more expensive than Dell. We did not feel there was a lot of benefit. So, most of our fleet is HPE and Dell.

Dell servers are much better at temperature management than HPE. I do not have any problems with Dell servers, but the experience that I have been getting with sales at the moment has been very lackluster with Dell.

In terms of the physical hardware, both Dell and HPE are excellent. We run the same drives, CPUs, and memory. They both perform excellently. Dell servers are a bit more reliable and much more resilient to temperature.

The rails are difficult. The way they clip in seems good on paper, but when you are doing it yourself at a data center with a 30, 40, or 50 KG server, it is very difficult to try and line them up, whereas, with some of the competitors, you just kind of push in. They are much easier to put in.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. These servers are absolutely worth the money. We have no regrets. We still would not be using them otherwise. 

They cost a lot of money, but they are worth every cent of it because they just work. You just put them in. We run our data center in Sydney, Australia, but my office is based in Melbourne. If anything breaks in the data center, we have to fly to Sydney to fix it. We do not take many flights because we use enterprise hardware.

Dell is pretty good. good. I had a conversation with Dell a while ago due to a vendor. We got much better pricing from a competitor. When I looked at another company, Dell called me and asked why am I looking at someone else when they have a distributor. I told them that their pricing was not good, so Dell went back to the distributor, and we got much better pricing. It is displeasing that I had to do that, but at the same time, I understand that the company is trying to make as much money as they can. I do not mean that in a bad way. That is the way all companies are. They were just trying to get what they could. Other than that, it has been pretty good.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten only because there is always room for improvement, but I would not put anyone above them. I cannot think of a vendor that is on par. After ten years, I am still buying them.

We preinstalled Microsoft Windows Server on Dell PowerEdge servers due to its ease of installation and deployment within our data center.

We utilize Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for our file server, Windows server, and WTS server for services.

We use models, T350, T440, and T560.

The PowerEdge cyber-resilient architecture approach to security is excellent. We can close all the ports as we want and change the ports of the iDRAC. We can also separate the networks for the iDRAC. I love this functionality.

I am impressed with the efficiency of the PowerEdge Rack Servers. I compared their power consumption with that of APC/UPS units and found them to be highly efficient for utilization.

PowerEdge has enabled us to centralize the management of all servers and installations. We now have a single, easy-to-follow document for managing our entire infrastructure.

PowerEdge servers have helped reduce unplanned production downtime by 60 percent.

I find the support site where we collect drivers valuable. 

The OpenMange console is effective. 

The Life Cycle Manager is a valuable feature.

Overall Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are user-friendly.

The scalability has room for improvement.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for almost three years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are stable. I have never had an issue.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are not highly scalable.

The technical support is good and also effective. There was one time that I resolved an issue myself.

Positive

We previously used HPE, but its capabilities and capacities were not as good as those of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took me a few hours to complete.

The high cost of Dell PowerEdge Rack Server licenses is attributed to the pre-installed Windows Server operating system from Microsoft.

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

Our critical workloads include the printer server, file server, HR server, and all other applications stored in our data center.

To protect from malware and firmware attacks, we have an EDR that we use to secure our active directory and a centralized password manager in the cloud.

We utilize public cloud servers concurrently with PowerEdge rack servers.

We have eight admins that work directly with our Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

I highly recommend Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

We primarily use the solution as servers for a range of tasks, including printer servers, internet servers, and a range of application servers. 

We have two and they are hosts. We run about 12 VMs on them that run different things on our site. We have a main site and two satellite sites that run. They run in a failover cluster using Hyper-V in an active-active configuration. If one goes down, the other will take over.

We chose to preinstall Microsoft Windows Server with the Dell PowerEdge servers based on the cost. The OEM licensing is cheaper than buying it any other way.

It is quite flexible when you use it.

The support is good.

I like how you can type in the asset tag and download all the drives.

Finding information about the server is simple.

It helps with the evolving needs of workloads. They've also been very quick with good value for the speed of the processor. They offer very good high-performance workloads.

The assigned firmware updates are very good. If you have an OS that doesn't work well or is suffering, we are able to fix the server much faster.

It has very good user management.

The energy consumption is good, although we haven't compared it to anything else. 

The OpenManage console is great. You can configure and gain visibility. When you are doing firmware upgrades, you can configure items. 

The user interface is very well designed. 

It's helped improve our productivity. It allows for pretty quick fault finding and when it takes less time to find the fault, you waste less of the technician's time.

Our OS is 2012 and we will be leveraging the latest cybersecurity systems when we update our OS.

The solution has improved our IT infrastructure. The removal of any single points of failure, allowed us to really reduce any hardware-related downtime. We realized improvements within three to six months. We don't get that kind of hardware downtime anymore using the active-active two-carriage servers. It's been a major improvement in downtime.

The PowerEdge service has positively impacted our IT infrastructure and its ability to handle the demands of the remote distributed workforce. We can easily deploy new VMs and have open storage. It's far better than the old approach. It allows you to be flexible and to be faster at fixing items and changing to different environments.

We use ERP, which is critical to our business. It's an SQL Server-based ERP system. The integration is very good. It helps the apps work very well. It is important to have the integration of the apps and workloads for our business demands. We use a variety of different approaches. We do have to make sure that we have our network configured correctly with VLANs. We have good user management. We have EDR software installed and run computers. We also have firewalls that proactively act as a strong Umbrella. 

PowerEdge has helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. For example, being able to upgrade the firmware through the IDAC when there's a problem with the server is very helpful. The redundancy built into the service is good, and the fact that there's no single point of failure between the servers and the SAN is also very good.

OEM licensing does not allow you to transfer from one server to another. You need to replace hardware and software together. 

It would be nice if they could make the solution cheaper and faster. 

At the moment, our SAN is very complicated to understand. I'd like there to be more simplicity around it. More integration between the SAN and the OS would be useful.

I've been using Dell for 30 years.

The solution is highly stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We had a set of faults when we went live with our last set of servers in the middle of the night, Dell assigned an Australian manager when our site stopped and Dell managed to get three new disks delivered at 6 AM on our side and managed to get them all working. They helped us turn a disaster around. When people came in the next morning, we had everything figured out. The majority of support interactions are very good.

Positive

I've used other servers, including HP and IBM. I tend to stick with Dell as I know it well. HP needs to be built yourself. Dell is pre-built and offers good value for money. The support is very good as well. 

We are using the version we bought seven years ago and we'll be replacing it in the next month. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. It was more complicated as we went from actual service to VMs so there was a bit of complexity there. We ran the kit side by side and then migrated each server one at a time over the course of a month.  

We hired Dell consultants to assist with the implementation work.

I have no specific ROI statistics to compare.

I have been quite impressed with the price. 

We did consider public cloud servers before choosing Dell. The cost was much more going that route. It would have been multiple times mroe than what we've spent on Dell servers. We also prefer the control of having servers on-site. We have more options that way.

We did compare latency and found that latency would be better using on-site servers. 

We use a lot of Microsoft. It's 95% of what we use. That's who our ERP provider uses and where a lot of our apps are. 

I have not used much of the cyber security features of the servers. 

I have not done any integrations with third parties however that is a plan for the future.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd advise new users to get quotes from other providers as well, such as HP and IBM. However, Dell systems are built and support is good. 

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for our storage.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are always ahead of the curve when it comes to speed and performance, and therefore, they are more than adequately positioned to deal with the demands of changing infrastructure and changing demands from the business.

The cyber-resilient architecture of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers allows us to customize the information for individual users rather than being limited to a single generic account.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are continually evolving to achieve optimal energy efficiency and performance, utilizing the latest processors from both AMD and Intel.

Dell's OpenManage Console for lifecycle management is user-friendly. We have utilized a centralized console for both overall management and individualized control. The process, from initial setup to complete patching of firmware and drivers, is remarkably straightforward. Furthermore, its integration with the cloud eliminates the need for manual driver downloads or ISO installations. Since it operates entirely through the cloud, the process is exceptionally uncomplicated.

OpenManage Console helps our IT staff to be more productive.

The OpenManage Console reduces the time required for us to deploy new data centers by 25 percent because we can perform all tasks from the central console on a subscription basis.

The native OS security features have helped protect our environment from attacks.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers exhibit high uptime. Once they are up and running, they remain operational, making them easy to maintain and manage in terms of driver patching. We observed these advantages immediately.

The impact of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers on our IT infrastructure and its ability to handle the demands of a remote or distributed workforce is good. This is because we can manage all of them from a central source. The presence of iDRAC means that we don't have to visit sites unnecessarily; everything can be managed efficiently.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers help in reducing unplanned production downtime by 100 TB. The maintenance we perform is very efficient. We plan for it, and the average failure rate is quite low. Therefore, we don't experience too many failures.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are user-friendly. The setup is easy and the overall experience with Dell from sales to support is absolutely wonderful.

The most valuable feature is the integration with ESXi, where they provide their custom ISOs, ensuring that all the drivers are installed.

I would appreciate the capability to carry out live updates without the need to take the system offline.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for 20 years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have been stable, which is why I have been using them for 20 years.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are scalable across the entire product range, ranging from one U to multiple U configurations and from single sockets to multiple sockets to cater to various markets.

The technical support is excellent, and they consistently possess extensive knowledge about the products.

Positive

We previously utilized Cisco Servers but transitioned to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers due to their cost-effectiveness and reliability. These systems have slight differences; while one serves as Unified Communications, the other is stand-alone and is more manageable.

The initial setup is straightforward. I created a document explaining how to perform the task, and it was quite straightforward for individuals who are not familiar with PowerEdge systems. There weren't any complexities in the setup process; it's essentially a repetitive procedure. Once we've configured one PowerEdge server, the process is the same for all of them, as the product line doesn't substantially differ from a setup standpoint when utilizing PowerEdge servers.

Starting from the moment when ESXi is installed, the deployment takes approximately half a day to finish.

I have implemented the solution in-house and have also utilized Insight UK as our integrator at my previous job.

I am satisfied with the pricing of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and would rate the cost as seven out of ten, with ten being the best.

We chose Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and Microsoft due to their lower cost and user-friendly nature.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten.

The integration of the app workloads with PowerEdge Rack Servers depends on the key factor of the operating system.

Using a public cloud instead of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers can potentially be more costly. The latency of any on-premises device will always be greater than that of the cloud.

I highly recommend Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as long as they meet the organization's requirements for their use case. Users should first figure out their use case and ensure that their goals align with the available options.

The primary use case involves running virtualization workloads mostly. Additionally, we have high-performance workloads and have built a dedicated solution for them using PowerEdge Servers.

The PowerEdge Servers have helped reduce unplanned production downtime by approximately ten percent. The use of the app OpenManage Console has made tasks easier, allowing IT staff to focus on other responsibilities, thus positively impacting overall flexibility and business operations.

The ease of management and automation possibilities are the most valuable features offered by Dell PowerEdge Servers.

One issue is the limited CPU options on the servers compared to the vendor, Intel. Dell offers fewer CPU options than available, which is a bit limiting and could be improved.

I have been using Dell rack servers for four years.

Overall, the servers are reliable, although we have experienced some issues. However, they have been mostly reliable, and we have not considered switching.

It was quite easy to scale our Dell infrastructure as our needs grew, improving our operations positively.

I haven't had much contact with Dell customer support, but I would rate their professional support probably an eight.

Positive

Previously, we evaluated HP servers. We chose Dell PowerEdge Servers due to their ease of management.

The initial setup was very good. We have automated almost everything, right from installation to management.

We did not use Dell Deployment Services for deployment and did it in-house.

The biggest return on investment comes from the ease of management and automation possibilities.

Before choosing Dell PowerEdge Servers, we evaluated HP servers.