Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

The use cases are related to Medical Oncology, everything that has to do with radiotherapy.

By implementing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, I wanted a platform with good reliability, good work, and good service.

It gives us reliability for our applications. It offers us a secure and scalable infrastructure, which has become essential to virtualize our workloads.

The PowerEdge Cyber Resilient Architecture approach to security is very good. I see much more interest from Dell in providing security that reflects our requirements. Because of better monitoring capabilities, it eliminates dependence on third-party certification authorities.

In terms of energy consumption, I would rate it an eight out of ten. They continually add more and more features to improve power consumption. In all the years as a Dell PowerEdge user, I have seen an improvement in their power delivery and consumption.

The impact of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has been very high on our organization’s sustainability goals. In our company, we need a platform with high scalability and the capability to handle high workload. With the reliability of the platform, we feel free to be able to deal with other issues.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have clearly reduced unplanned production downtime, but I cannot exactly say how much.

The OpenManage console has affected the level of productivity of the IT team. In terms of system repair, they receive fewer demands, which makes them meet more goals than before.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have affected the overall flexibility of our operations or business. The better performance the servers have, the better the applications will work, which consequently leads to better performance for Dell as well as for the company that uses its services.

The reliability and the execution of the necessary assignments are valuable.

I would like them to be more flexible when implementing more capabilities.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for 15 years.

The stability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is very good.

The scalability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is very good.

We used HP 15 years ago. We switched because of the decision at the company management level.

The implementation was very simple.

They are currently deployed on-premises, with the possibility of a private cloud. We use Microsoft Azure. They are implemented at several locations. In the Galicia community, we have an implementation of PowerEdge with VxRail as well.

We had project managers from our company and from Dell.

The biggest ROI is reliability. These servers never fail, and the performance of these servers is great. They are stable 99% of the time and do not show any signs of failure.

They are good and reflect the prices on the market. We always wish they were lower, but they are good.

At that time, we evaluated IBM and FUJITSU. In general, Rack Servers offer us much more reliability.

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

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.