Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

We are using R640 and R740 models. We use the solution as the back end and front end of our environment.

We use it for computing, storage, and server capacity for our back-end and front-end workloads.

The product provides good quality for its price. PowerEdge is one of the best in the market. We have been using it for 12 to 15 years, and the server has broken only once. The product is reliable. It is really important for us. The tool delivers everything we need. It does what we want it to do.

The product must improve its integration with VMware. It is really important to us. They should make the management more out of the box so we have less maintenance.

I have been using the solution for 12 to 15 years.

The tool is stable.

The scalability depends a little bit on the software we use.

The initial setup is pretty easy. It is an out-of-the-box experience. It's plug-and-play. We click it in, attach the cables, and start.

As an enterprise customer, the pricing is fine for us. There are also possibilities to interact over the price and discuss. We have no complaints.

We have evaluated HPE and Cisco. The main difference we noticed is interoperability. We use a lot of VMware software. The integration with Dell is always perfect. It is a big advantage for us. HPE lacks interoperability.

The Cyber Resilient Architecture approach is a good step. Hackers always try to get into infrastructures or use ransomware to encrypt files. Dell has taken it very seriously. We can see there's a lot of development in PowerEdge. New services are coming out. It's more powerful. It also has less energy consumption. They're going in the right direction.

We use the OpenManage console to patch our servers. It made some really good developments in the last few years. We can just press a button, and the upgrade continues. We're very happy with it. It has made our staff's work easier and reduced the time spent on tasks. A task that took us 40 hours before now takes us 20 hours to complete.

The product has provided us with reliability in a positive way. 

HPE and Lenovo are the product's competitors.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in my company, mostly for virtualization and also for some applications running directly on physical machines.

The solution's lifecycle management with iDRAC works really well, and it is a valuable feature because it helps with maintenance and keeping track of what we have in our company.

The product offers a bit of a larger landscape to manage the entire environment. There is a feature that allows you to see the power distribution the rack servers in your environment use. 

The product has some other features that were really beneficial for my company and made it easier for us to work with the systems, as it became easier to expand and fix them online.

We wanted to have two storage cards during the onboarding process of the solution, which were available only on the more expensive version of the boxes that we usually use for work in our company. It would have been easier for my company to deal with the product if the two storage cards provided during the solution's onboarding process of the expensive versions of the solution were available for the slightly simpler versions of the tool.

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

In our company, we have had some really good results with the product's hardware, but we also had a couple of sets of hardware be bought that had a lot of memory errors, so we needed to have a lot of DIMM hardware replaced. In my company, we had really stable sets of hardware and not-so-stable ones as well.

The range of systems under Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is large enough to have both small enough systems and large enough systems, so the product's scalability is fine.

It is not me but mostly my colleagues who have contacted the solution's technical support. From what I know, I can say that the solution's technical support works really well, so it's okay. In our company, we can schedule a replacement part very quickly with the help of the solution's technical support. 

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In my company, we had experienced too many hardware failures with our previous solution supplier, HPE.

My company's tools for deployment had to be modified to take care of the product's deployment phase. The product's deployment phase was not super complicated, but it did take my company a couple of weeks to build it up and to make it work, which was not too bad. The aforementioned process would have been the same for every other company as well, so it was okay, in my opinion, since it was not worse than the processes of some other tools.

I don't know about the product's licensing part. Price-wise, it is an okay product. I believe that the cheaper the better, but I think that the product's price is okay.

As a part of my company's evaluation process, we considered Supermicro against Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. Compared to Supermicro, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are a bit cheaper, but the product's con stems from the fact that we had to do too many things in our company to make it work. The amount of effort to maintain all of it and to build or maintain it all was too much. Though the product was a little bit more expensive than Supermicro, its management features were way more extensive, which made a difference for us in our company.

In my company, we were trying to resolve some particular issues through the implementation of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, as we had experienced too many hardware failures with our previous solution supplier, HPE.

PowerEdge Cyber Resilient Architecture's approach to security, including the silicon-based root of trust, signed firmware updates, and user access security, works well, but my company doesn't have many sales-related areas to report.

The assessment of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for energy consumption in my company is not much of a big deal for us. In our company, we saw that the energy consumption of the product depends on which role of the machines it is concerned with, especially when it came to the more mission-critical servers which we used to use in high-performance mode, causing them to use more power because it helped make our company quicker which in turn helped with the generation of higher revenue for us. Power consumption was not much of an issue like a couple of years ago, meaning it has changed a bit. Our company has B Corp certification, causing us to look towards areas like the product's energy consumption since it is much more important now than it used to be in the past.

In terms of the concept of power or energy consumption of the product, I can say that it fits and helps meet my company's requirements because of the different power profiles we can deploy.

In my company, we don't use OpenManage Enterprise.

The overall flexibility of our organization's operations with the use of PowerEdge Rack Servers has been okay, as we usually use virtualization software on top of the product, giving us big-sized machines.

There are a lot of options that one can opt for when using the solution. I like how my company talks with people inside Dell to help us with what we need or figure out how to do something. If you look at the product from a broader perspective, it works really well as a large package.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We're using it for various purposes, such as DB servers, web servers, application servers, file servers, print servers, etc.

We can use the OpenManage console for managing multiple rack servers. We can manage all of them in a single console. The firmware can be pushed on multiple servers via the OpenManage console. It's very user-friendly, and it makes it easy to download and update the firmware. There are multiple options. If I have 15 servers of the same model, to update the firmware, I don't need to download the firmware on each server. With the OpenManage console, we can download it just once and then push it to multiple servers.

The OpenManage console has affected our IT staff’s productivity. Upgrading firmware on each server generally takes two hours. So, upgrading firmware on multiple servers would take a lot of time. For example, for 15 servers, it would take at least 30 hours, whereas, with the OpenManage console, we can update all the servers within two hours.

The OpenManage console also decreases the time it takes to deploy new data centers. It would take more time to deploy the individual servers.

We can use Dell Lifecycle Controller for remote server management. If something happens, I use the iDRAC console to check the impact. It's easy to identify the issue from the iDRAC console. If there is a blue screen or purple screen, it's a hardware-related or software-related issue. I am based in India, but I can easily support US operations. iDRAC allows me to work remotely to troubleshoot. So, troubleshooting, as well as firmware downloads and updates, are very easy. All the firmware and drivers are available on a single page. I can download or update the firmware if there is a purple screen or a driver is missing. In the OpenManage console, everything is visible. We can see the installed version and the available version in a single console. It shows anything that is non-compliant in your list. If my environment has 1,000 servers, it will show whether all 1,000 servers are up to date or not. I can then identify and plan for the firmware updates. After updating the firmware, the hardware runs smoothly.

It supports multiple operating systems. I have experience installing Windows servers, ESXi, and Linux. It's not only for Windows. We use the VMware ESXi operating system. On ESXi, we run around 6,000 virtual servers. We have app servers, DB servers, and file servers. There are also manufacturing applications, where they are running robotic machines. So, there are different applications running.

You can use Dell PowerEdge hardware for anything. It supports everything such as file servers, web servers, and DB servers. It can support all critical servers and applications. There are bank applications running on PowerEdge servers.

PowerEdge rack servers are good in terms of energy consumption.

Dell hardware is not as stable as HP. I have not seen any issues with HP in five years, but with Dell, I am getting multiple issues. It's not stable. They need to verify why it has multiple issues and why Dell hardware is not as stable as HP hardware.

I have 15 years of experience in the IT industry. I have worked in multiple companies, and I have more than 10 years of experience with Dell hardware. I have worked with Dell PowerEdge R720, R730, R740, R830, R840, and R940, and I have also worked with Dell PowerEdge VRTX Chassis M630 and M640.

Dell hardware is not as stable as HP hardware.

Their support is number one worldwide. I never got that much support with other hardware. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I have also worked with HP hardware in one of the companies. In five years, I generally did not see any issues with HP hardware, but in case I had any problem with hardware, they took more than 10 days to replace the hardware or troubleshoot the problem. I don't like that. Whereas Dell provides support within four hours for hardware replacement. They provide better support. Within four hours, they arrange for a replacement. Their support is number one. I would recommend Dell because their support is very good.

Dell's hardware is not as stable as HP's. We see multiple issues, such as hard disk failures. We need to apply updates or patches. Dell is user-friendly. So, it's very easy to apply and download, but the hardware is not stable. This is the only part that needs to be developed from Dell's side.

HP is more expensive than Dell. Dell provides better quotes. They give multiple options to buy the hardware.

Its deployment is very easy. Anybody can deploy it. They provide everything. Its deployment is easy and user-friendly.

For deployment, we have customized ISO for our environment. We use that. For ESXi, we are using the Dell custom image that they provide on their website. We can download that directly from there, and that's it.

One of the clients has been offered a price of $18,000 instead of the regular price of around $25,000.

It supports everything. You can install anything you want. If you want DB, you can do that. If you need high-performance workloads, you need to increase storage capacity. It depends on the configuration, but it will support that. The PowerEdge server has 16 slots. You just need to buy maximum capacity during the purchase.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for virtualization.

The versatility has been great. We have several different configurations with different networking capabilities, different capacity, throughput, and configurations. I work on a dark site in a classified environment. I can't really comment too much beyond that.

PowerEdge is great for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads like VDI, AI, and SAP on multi-cloud. We're very happy with their performance. We're lucky enough to also have Dell and VMware. We call them a TAM specialist on-site. If we have any problems, they respond to them quickly.

Since we are in a classified environment, we appreciate the security specifications very much. It helps us as we have to do our own assessments and those security features help us to get our paperwork done.

We use Dell's Optane Memory in our PowerEdge environment. I’m not sure if it’s saved money, I’m really not on the financial side. We have a budget and then we go and shop for the best bang for the buck. Since we are using that feature, it does save us money. However, I can’t say how much.

We do use Dell's OpenManage console. It is easy to use this console for lifecycle management or PowerEdge servers. We use it primarily when we have a network issue or if we can't access the servers our usual way. It's very convenient as a secondary way to access it. As far as life cycle management, that's what we use when we need to do our upgrades, firmware, and the like. It's very valuable. It’s increased our IT staff's productivity, however, I can't tell by how much.

Using PowerEdge helped to reduce unplanned production downtime by 20% to 25%.

We'd want the solution to be faster, and of course, for them to bring down the price. 

I've probably been using PowerEdge Servers since 2010. 

Technical support is very good to excellent. We have a dedicated Dell support team, and they are very knowledgeable. If they don't know the answer and they almost always do, they'll get the answer right away. We're very satisfied with their help.

Positive

We are moving to VxRails. We are using it for virtualization, and for some file storage, and then we're going to be moving to VDI solutions as we get more VxRails that have GPU capability.

In the past, we used HP. We used Oracle hardware as well. Oracle has its own hard drives. They buy their servers and then put their logo on them and then resell that. Those are probably the two biggest companies that we've used in the past.

We switched to Dell due to the cost and feature sets. We liked the feature set of the Dell, however, the operating costs and maintenance costs, contracts, were a big selling factor. A lot of the hardware that we used to have was older as well. 

I used HP servers. They have a service like Dell OpenManage called iLO. It does the same thing. You can access the servers through the network to help with firmware upgrades. The HP hardware, at the time, was more expensive for maintenance and to buy new. When we went to VxRails and PowerEdge, it was a better deal, more bang for the buck, that's why we switched.

I was not a part of the initial setup.

I did not evaluate other servers from other vendors before choosing PowerEdge.

We did consider public cloud servers before choosing PowerEdge. We use both.

We compared latency and costs when looking at PowerEdge versus the public cloud. At the time, the public cloud looked more attractive on paper. When we did testing, the latency and throughput were comparable. However, the Dell PowerEdge Servers that we had on-premises had a little bit better performance, as the cloud was quite a distance from where our data center is. It's comparable, however, when we looked at the overall cost of a public cloud, it was much more expensive to do a public cloud, and it was less expensive to do on-premises. Most of PowerEdge is mostly on-premises.

The first one I ever used, was an R710 PowerEdge server. We're using 740s now. We also use VxRail. I know those aren't specifically PowerEdge, however, we're moving from PowerEdge servers to VxRail.

I don't really do much on the data center side of things, so I can't really comment on the power consumption. That's not my focus.

We do not use Intel Xeon Scalable processors in our PowerEdge servers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I run network function workloads on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has some power-saving options and employs various green IT concepts. PowerEdge servers consume a normal amount of energy. Like any system, it requires significant energy, but the thermal design limits power consumption. Depending on the type of CPU or hardware you add, it will draw the necessary amount of energy. 

They have implemented small measures to reduce planned downtime. You can schedule upgrades and do other things to limit the total downtime, but it isn't significant compared to other solutions. 

The hardware itself is pleasant to work with. The management ability, particularly the out-of-band management, seems quite nice. The ecosystem tooling is also pleasant to work with. 

Additionally, Dell offers good support, and the servers are reliable.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are competitive, but there is room for energy efficiency improvement considering the thermal design and power consumption. The OpenManage Console offers smart features, but its impact is not significantly better than competitors.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for approximately two and a half years.

I haven't experienced any failures with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, so I find the stability to be good.

The scalability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is good as well.

I rate Dell support 10 out of 10. Dell support is excellent. They are proactive and maintain regular contact to ensure successful deployments.

Positive

The initial setup was conducted in-house and was smooth. The deployment and ongoing management of the servers are satisfactory.

The implementation was done internally, without external help.

The biggest ROI comes from transitioning to commodity hardware and removing legacy hardware. This includes adopting generic x86 hardware offered by different vendors.

Before using Dell, we evaluated multiple vendors. Dell was selected because they fulfilled all the requirements during an RFP process.

I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers 10 out of 10. The system doesn't perform better or worse than competitors, but it performs exactly as expected. I'm getting what I purchased.

I have been using PowerEdge servers primarily for file storage.

Using PowerEdge rack servers has allowed us to use less space. Previously, we used the regular servers, but PowerEdge rack servers take up less space and are easier to handle.

The OpenManage Console improves our IT staff productivity by simplifying platform management. We can keep track of all those servers and do more jobs. The server effectively handles the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. 

The management of the security architecture could be improved. It takes some time and can be challenging. 

I have been using PowerEdge servers for over 20 years.

The overall stability is okay. We had some disk issues with an older version, but newer versions have worked fine.

PowerEdge infrastructure is scalable, but we don't have much need to scale it.

We used HP servers before. The main differences between HP and Dell are price and management. Dell is better priced. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed PowerEdge in-house using OpenManage. 

The biggest return on investment for me is the stability of the product.

Dell is priced better than alternative solutions.

I rate Dell PowerEdge eight out of 10. PowerEdge servers have improved the overall flexibility of our operations and business a little by simplifying operations and rationalizing placement. 

We buy the servers without an OS and use Linux and open-source options with it. As we are a web hosting company, these servers primarily serve our customers by hosting their Websites, VPS, Emails, Domains, and other services. We also use them for our own infrastructure and our products.

We're a global web hosting company with data centers throughout the world, so we need lots of powerful, reliable, and efficient servers. That’s what Dell PowerEdge servers are. We've been using them for many years and trust the product. 

It has good quality control, and some of my colleagues were able to see this first-hand during a visit to the Dell factory.

We received good demo equipment that helped us pick the best solutions for our business. Plus, we can choose optimal setups and configurations that best fit the needs of our web, cloud, and virtual private server hosting clients.

The servers always arrive with the latest firmware and are very good at handling high-performance workloads. They meet our ever-growing needs, including those associated with AI.

The pricing is very flexible, and the commitment to delivery and working with partners is excellent.

Dell offers us good warranties and is very good at delivering on them when necessary.

In terms of energy consumption, PowerEdge servers are okay. We do find Dell servers to be more efficient than others; however, it depends on the CPU usage and workload. Our newest processors are more power-efficient, and NVMe SSD disc drives help save even more energy. User-friendly OpenManage console helps us efficiently manage the lifecycle of PowerEdge servers. However, we are not using it at full scale.

The servers are easy to set up, and we use a variety of server security features in our current environment. An important advantage is that we can make OS patches and hotfixes without a reboot.

We are quite satisfied with our latest configurations. We don't have big complaints at the moment. 

The response time could be better. Everyone is very busy nowadays. It's important to get issues resolved fast. 

We've used the solution for around three and four years.

The stability is very good. I'd rate stability nine out of ten.

Dell PowerEdge servers improved our IT infrastructure. We have fewer failures and good warranties, and by keeping everything up to date and patched, we reduced unplanned downtime by 20% to 30%. We've also noticed that these servers are 20% more powerful than similar configurations.

As the fastest-growing web hosting company with over 2.5 million clients worldwide, scalability is crucial for us. Dell server scalability is good. If we need more capacity, we just buy more servers. The most recent example is our purchase of 800 Dell servers.

Dell offers helpful technical support, including help and guidance when we have new server configurations.

Positive

We've been on the market for 20 years and tested a lot of the competition. We've used at least three different vendors before Dell.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

First, we need to ship our servers to a remote location. However, for racking and installing operating systems, et cetera, it takes about one hour. 

The ROI is good. I can’t give the exact numbers, but in terms of outcomes, it is profitable.

While pricing is very important, it's not all about the cost. With Dell, we have fewer issues, and updating processes are faster—which makes it worth the cost.

Overall, the solution is fairly priced and cost-effective. The overall pricing is moderate. 

We have considered a public cloud server before choosing Dell.

We are Dell partners and customers. 

I'd advise potential users to try Dell. I would recommend the solution.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I'm quite satisfied with how everything is going. We do not have any complaints. 

We are a web hosting company, so we host websites. They are predominantly high-value websites. They tend to be very intensive applications, so we use CPUs with lots of cores and memory. We try to get as much performance as possible out of these machines.

At the moment, we are using Dell R640 and 740XD, and we have some 540s for backups.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are very good for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. Even though we do not use the very latest generation servers, they are in line with our customers' needs. Our customers do not know or care what the specs of the servers are. They just want the results, which speed from websites or whatever applications they are running. We have a very strong reputation in the industry for producing those fast results, and at the moment, Dell servers support that very well. Our knowledge perhaps is not as good as it could be on some of the latest technologies. We do not even use NVMe storage yet, but I am quite interested in seeing some of the new technology for NVMe support.

Due to our environmental compliance, we are very aware of our consumption, and it is pleasing to see regular improvements in that area. We are regularly looking at and reviewing our power consumption. We replaced some of our older Dell models with newer ones, which are way more efficient. They are very good in terms of energy consumption. There is a useful calculator available on their website to work out how much we are going to be using, so we can tell in advance. Before we populate a new data center cabinet, we can see how much we should expect it to be using. That makes it a lot easier. We then do not underfill or overfill a cabinet. We can maximize the use of the space by knowing with some degree of accuracy how much power is going to be used.

I like the reliability and ease of swapping out failed equipment. It is very easy to replace power supplies and drives.

We use older-generation servers. We are two generations behind. There can be remote access management and iDRAC improvements, but I do not have many complaints about that.

From the licensing model perspective, it might be useful for enterprises to get an overall enterprise license, rather than licensing each server. That is one option because we tend to buy the service with the licenses, but some of our older equipment does not have them.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for about ten years.

They are very reliable.

We tend to buy quite high-spec servers, so we do not need to upgrade, but storage-wise, typically, we always have an empty base in the servers we deploy. So, we have plenty of scope for scaling.

We do not use their support. We use a third party. We rarely need to get support because the equipment is so reliable. 

We used to use HPE many years ago. We moved to Dell because their servers were more customizable. We were able to use our own disks, for example, whereas HP would not allow us to do that. They had to ship the disks, and that was the main reason we moved.

Dell is just a little bit more logical. Even when you open up the box and carry out the replacement tasks with the components, it seems a little bit more logical. In every generation, there is a change, but when you open up a new box, it does not take long. Without reading the manual, you can figure out what needs to be done. We have never been disappointed with the new products that do come out, so we are quite involved now and attached to the Dell ecosystem.

They are very good in terms of deployment. Our automated system is there, and there is no problem with using our deployment tool with it. I cannot think of a case where we have hit a problem. It has been fast. There is nothing to do with the hardware. There are no obstacles.

We looked at Supermicro, but we never found them very reliable. The chassis and the build felt a little bit more flimsy compared to Dell. Dell servers felt a lot more like enterprise hardware.

In terms of the impact of PowerEdge Servers on our organization’s sustainability goals, we have not recycled much old equipment. I am not sure what to do with it. I do not know whether they have any incentives for returning old hardware. One thing we need to factor in is how to dispose of older hardware.

For the simple needs that we have, I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten.