Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

I'm using the server for Exchange and it gives me good performance.

I like the iDRAC feature.

I have also seen long life from each part and haven't had to call support, as far as I remember. I use competitors like HPE and we need spare parts every year. I have been using this server for 10 years and haven't faced any problems with the hardware or performance.

The BIOS interface could be improved; it is very poor. PowerEdge is very good overall, but if you compare the BIOS interface with HPE, it is not very good. HPE's is very advanced but Dell's is very simple.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for about 10 years.

The stability is about a seven out of 10.

It is scalable, but we are not planning to get more PowerEdge servers. We are planning to go with hyper-converged. We are looking to extend our environment and deploy a new DR site.

We have multiple locations and about 400 users.

Their support is excellent, but here I'm referring to all our Dell products, because I haven't had to contact them about PowerEdge.

I didn't have a previous solution, but I work with HPE servers at the same time. There is no major difference between them in performance or specifications. I prefer Dell for its warranty, which is very good here in Egypt. I am able to extend my warranty for one or two years.

For me, the setup was easy.

The only maintenance is cleaning it and adding hard disks.

I did it, as a system admin, with my team of three people: technical support and our help desk team.

Dell is somewhat more expensive than HPE.

In terms of money, if I compare a cloud system and an on-premises server like PowerEdge, if I rent the same type of product in the cloud for 10 years, it will cost more than if I get a PowerEdge server for five years.

If you invest in your network, it will be advantageous. 

We have two that we use as domain controllers and power servers. We're running an ERP system that is critical to the business, but the majority of our other stuff is cloud-based.

In comparison to what we had before, which was some older Dell equipment, the performance of the PowerEdge Rack Servers is stunning. They have improved the performance of our systems. We've been a Dell house for years and years, and replacing the older Dell equipment with these machines has given us a very positive performance increase.

We're quite a small company, so anything we can throw at any of these servers— they will just eat it for breakfast. We've had no problems with them.

We haven't had any unplanned production downtime. That is down to the quality of the Dell servers.

The fact that they came pre-installed was quite good. We didn't have to worry too much about that process. 

In terms of the usage of the machines themselves, one of the most valuable features is the Hyper-V element, although that's an application on the servers. 

Also, the maintenance part makes it very easy to raise queries and get repairs done.

In terms of handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads, while I don't have anything to compare these servers against, I have no issues with the performance of our systems. They work as well as I could expect them to. They will be perfectly fine for our workloads.

The rate controller interface is difficult to get to without installing additional software. It would be helpful if they had preinstalled software to make that easily accessible.

The company I'm with at the moment purchased Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers back in 2018 or 2019.

We've never had any outages, so the stability is perfect, or as close to perfect as you can get.

We've had the UPS kick in a couple of times and they've stayed up; they haven't died instantly. They are perfectly acceptable and I can't see any issues with them at all.

We haven't really had to upscale anything on the servers, other than a bit of memory. The particular modules we have are about as high as we can go, but that's fine because we purchased them to be "high-spec'd."

The technical support is very good. We have access to our own account manager and he will pass queries on. And on occasion, I've spoken directly to their support teams. We have been very pleased with the account management from Dell. It's been good.

Positive

We previously used Dell, but older machines. We made the switch because the old kit was getting too old. It was getting to end-of-life, and we needed some performance improvements. The PowerEdge definitely gave us that.

It did the initial setup, more or less, by itself. I did a little bit of fine-tuning here and there, but nothing drastic. It was very easy. 

I was the only person involved. I was responsible for everything from physically getting the stuff in the rack to configuring it and making it live, and everything in between.

We have seen a return on investment because of the performance improvements and the fact that we have had no downtime. That's enough for us.

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

I've been working with Dell for a number of years and never had any issues, so Dell was the go-to solution for me. We had a quick look at other machines in terms of pricing, and there wasn't any particular benefit in terms of pricing by going with someone else. With the history and trust I had in Dell, I went with Dell.

One native OS security feature we use in our environment is Windows Defender, but at the same time, we are running a third-party endpoint protection solution. The native OS security features have had no negative impact. The endpoint protection is on both the clients and servers. We run vulnerability scanning regularly, and we do penetration testing, internal and external, on a regular basis.

As for public cloud servers, we did not consider them before choosing PowerEdge because we use them for internal management. We are looking at cloud solutions, but not for the core, critical servers.

We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel for Windows Servers and VMware Servers.

With Intel’s Xeon scalable processors in our PowerEdge Rack Servers, we have been able to reduce the number of servers we need when we change our workloads to the new generation, once every five years or so. I can feel a big improvement in terms of workload.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel

• are easy to use 
• are easy to manage with Dell's OpenManage Console
• have extended support for five years.

When it comes to handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads, they're good. They deliver like they're supposed to.

And while I haven't had to use the BIOS recovery, it's a nice feature in case there is a problem.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for 15 years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are reliable, so I can say that they have reduced unplanned production downtime.

We use PowerEdge in a VM environment, so it is scalable.

We haven't used Dell's tech support.

We are also using HPE and Lenovo servers right now.

Deploying PowerEdge is straightforward. To get it up and running takes about an hour.

We always implement with in-house team.

We've been using the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for a long time and have found them to be very reliable. With the extended support, we can use them for five years, so it's a good investment.

The pricing could always be better.

When I compare PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel to the other vendors like HPE or Lenovo, I can say that it's a bit better than them. It delivers good value. Dell provides longer support for operating systems when compared to HPE. We also considered all the public cloud servers, but they were not a cost-effective solution for our college. When we buy the on-prem service, we can use it for five years, and with a physical solution, we see a return on investment after about two years. If we were to use public cloud, we would lose after two years. This solution saves us about 1 million shekels (about $289,000 at the time of the review).

Dell's PowerEdge Rack Server is the best solution that I've seen, compared to other vendors.

My division is backup. We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel to deploy backup systems to back up the entire area or region where we are setting it up. We actually use it as a media server for backup.

For this server, we bought several with a net of 30 terabytes to use with a memory of about 256 gigs.

We have benefited in performance, especially when installing the media server for the backup and performing backup for high performance and fast storage.

I like Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel. It is a good, high performance server. It is easy to manage, especially with the iDRAC. 

iDRAC is its most valuable feature. The management from the iDRAC port is useful for me because my server is located in Australia, and I need to manage it from Israel. Therefore, it is useful for troubleshooting.

There is flexibility to use a lot of storage on the server. It has the ability to have it as a RAID and support that. This is most useful for me in the case of a malfunction in one or two drives. It is like having a server and storage together, i.e., hyperconverged. We can manage this remotely.

In regards to security, I have noticed that we can implement Active Directory to the iDRAC. It is more secure that way. Then, everyone can access it as they please.

We use Intel Xeon Scalable processors in our PowerEdge Rack Servers. They have very much helped to improve the performance of our targeted workloads. 

I would like them to add more NVMe slots. That would be good. That way, it would have better performance, e.g., enough storage for better performance than a spinning disk.

There is some improvement needed in the site (with its arrangement) when trying to find some configuration or troubleshooting matches.

We just bought two Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for a region. We installed them about a month ago.

It is very stable.

I am using it for backup, so it has to be reliable. Even in cases where there is downtime, we can then use the solution to retrieve data. 

Its scalability is great. I can add more storage and shelf to that server.

I have not yet needed the help of Dell support for PowerEdge Rack Servers. In the past, I have enjoyed my experience with Dell support for storage. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

Positive

Previously, we had an old HPE server that was backing up systems but taking a lot of time. Now, with the Intel Xeon and Dell server, it is a lot faster.

The HPE server was no longer supported, so we tried to check with some other vendors. Because of its flexibility to have more storage and scalability, we choose Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

The deployment of PowerEdge Rack Servers was new for me since I used to work with HPE servers. The setup was a little bit different, but it was easy to catch up and do the installation.

It took several minutes to determine how to work with PowerEdge and configure the BIOS. The one thing that surprised me is the ability to configure the BIOS from the iDRAC, not going directly inside the BIOS in order to do so.

I deployed it.

We installed the servers, and they are currently working.

The pricing and licensing are fair.

We evaluated HPE, Dell, and IBM. We chose Dell PowerEdge mostly because of the price and extendability.

It is easy to manage and extendable. Compared to other vendors, the prices are much lower. Go for it.

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

It is used for data center service.

PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are good for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads with classical use cases.

My company has thousands of customers. We are resellers as well as implement Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in our organization.

My organization provides software or application stacks for many organizations. So, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers add a lot of benefits for integration and testing purposes. It is also a solution for small-scale deployment at remote locations.

PowerEdge Rack Servers have affected the overall flexibility of our operations or business.

For labs, when you don't need a high SLA, HA, or other expensive support and maintenance fees, then it is very easy to deploy these servers. You pay CapEx but the usage for day two is easier.

It is easy to manage, maintain, and install.

The new stuff with AI, Hyperscale, and HPC for all sorts of general compute purposes makes it the best solution that you can have today.

PowerEdge Rack Servers’ approach to security with its signed firmware, drift detection, and BIOS recovery is very good. This is the natural behavior today in the market. All vendors provide it, including Dell.

It is very easy and seamless to use the Dell OpenManage console for the lifecycle management of PowerEdge Rack Servers. It is one of the best solutions in the market today to manage the lifecycle of services.

It is not good in terms of its energy consumption for a large-scale deployment. I probably would go for something more dense, like blades or any type of small scale hardware service solutions, to lower the heat and power consumption. However, for small environments, this solution is okay and easy to maintain.

I have been using PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel for 25 years.

PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are easier to handle in regards to upgrade and maintenance than any other solutions. It saves us over 50% of our time.

Usually, it is a very good solution for small-scale environments and environments that have difficulty providing services since the maintenance of PowerEdgeRack Servers is easier relative to any other solutions. Therefore, if you go for small-scale deployments, then PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are very simple and cost-effective.

The technical support from Dell is good. If you have an issue, the tech support is better than Lenovo and about the same as HPE. 

I would rate Dell's technical support as 8.5 out of 10, which is very good. While the technical support is very good, they are not perfect. You need to wait, and sometimes you need to escalate, which is a process. At the end of the day, it is economies of scale.

Positive

The rack and stack takes a couple of hours, maybe less. The overall installation depends on the use case. In general, it takes about two to three days to have a full working solution.

Intel's Optane memory has helped save money when adding memory capacity, compared to adding the same amount of DRAM.

The use of Dell's OpenManage console has decreased the time it takes to deploy new data centers.

The overall pricing and licensing are fair according to the market.

Because it is pay-per-use, there is a large offering from the application and software. This is what the customer requires, and I need to provide whatever they want. If they want to use the cloud, i.e., hyperscales as a solution, then I need to provide an application that will run on top. For me, it is a no-brainer. It is whatever the customer wants. 

In general, going to the public cloud has its benefits since the CAPEX is low and the OPEX is pay-per-use. However, you need to arrange your application and software in a way that will modernize and utilize the cloud economically. This is the downside of things.

We are a big company, so we are always evaluating everything.

For general purpose small-scale deployments, it has easy rack and stack and maintenance. For edge locations, this is the best solution that the market currently has to offer. 

Today, we are looking at other solutions other than Intel, such as AMD, because of the cost as well as the quantity of the cores that you can get for the same amount of use or footprint. 

There are also other solutions that are more cost-effective, but you can currently only get them on the cloud, like AWS Graviton, which is based off of ARM processing units. Currently, ARM is being provided only on cloud services. I haven't seen anyone provide ARM on-prem. However, if somebody provides a cost-effective, on-prem ARM, then we will consider going for ARM processing units.

I always prefer Dell because it is easier to maintain.

It used to have a very good effect on IT staff's productivity. However, the problem has now moved from the infrastructure to the upper layer.

I like the R640 model the best. 

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as nine out of 10.

We have a 1U and a 2U PowerEdge Server. We're using them to scale storage devices. They provide a platform for our software that involves managing multiple, high-speed disks. We're using them to connect Mellanox and Intel NICs, which are very fast network interfaces.

For us, the most valuable feature is the iDRAC. It helps us to solve problems when a server is stuck or hung or we don't have any network access. 

It's also easy to deploy new firmware or a new update to the servers remotely. 

We're also able to manage multiple servers in one place. 

Also, the way the hardware is architected, you can replace parts in no time. It's very quick and easy to replace a fan, disk, CPU, or insert a new card into the server.

I would like to see more information about server health and the server's state, on the front. HP has a little screen that shows server utilization, how many disks there are inside, and the power consumption. HP also shows an alert if there is a malfunction of any device inside. Those kinds of features would be useful for Dell customers.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel for about seven years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are very stable.

The scalability is a bit of a downside because of our technology. In our environment, the scalability comes from the network and not from adding another server. We are adding a lot of NVMe devices and when we reach capacity we need to add another server. This is what determines the scalability.

Dell provides very good support. It's very fast and they answer in a professional manner. That's what I need.

I would rate their support at nine out of 10. It's not a 10 because they have to improve by answering even faster. They also need to give local distributors more permission or to provide hardware parts faster. If you have a malfunction with the device, you usually have to send it abroad, and they investigate it and then bring it back. That takes a long time.

Positive

We are currently using Lenovo, AIC, Tyan, and Quanta servers in addition to the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel, because we need some OEM equipment to reduce the cost. PowerEdge has a high price tag. The price is a critical factor in our company. We don't have a lot of budget for acquiring servers and that is why we look at other vendors.

But the flexibility of the PowerEdge servers and the approach to resolving problems really quickly make it more convenient to work with. I like working with PowerEdge. Solving a problem on a PowerEdge will take, say, a few minutes, while with the other vendors it will take 10 to 20 minutes to investigate and debug the problem.

We are using both Intel and AMD technology with our Dell servers. We are comparing the performance of both. While there are some issues and challenges on the Intel side in some areas, the overall impression of the Intel technology is that it is working well. I expect we are going to use it for the next few years.

The Dell platform works very well. We are very happy with it. If price isn't a concern, I would recommend Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

We made a renovation of our infrastructure, and the problem we're solving is our performance and it is collectivity in our infrastructure too.

We have a full-scale infrastructure for six countries and are able to centralize it. With this kind of product, we are solving a lot of problems, or issues that we had before with regards to performance. The centralization of the platform for the company helped immensely.

The go-to-market implementation was pretty fast. The go-to-market speed for us was pretty important at the time we had to implement that infrastructure. 

In terms of the performance of the servers, I'm already pretty comfortable with that.

When it comes to PowerEdge rack servers handling the evolving needs of workloads, I have support from Dell partners. They constantly assess improvements for us and other versions of items on products. I keep up to date with it via my partners.

We use Dell's Optane to obtain memory in the PowerEdge environment. It helped save money in that aspect, as far as adding memory capacity. We used to negotiate these kinds of platforms and renewal with our partners on a full scale. We have a lot of cost-saving with this infrastructure.

PowerEdge helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. We have an IT continuity plan that is actually based on the infrastructure we already have implemented with Dell.

They could improve the time between new versions of the product. They could move faster, or maybe offer a little bit more support from the partners.

We've been using the solution for four years.

We have 6,500 people across six countries using the platform.

We have good support from Dell and good support from our partners. That said, sometimes it takes a pretty long time to get an answer from Dell. However, we get pretty good support from those folks.

Positive

We had used HP solutions and others as well. We changed as I had some experience with this product and we had comfort in the security that Dell gives us as a platform. The cost and the go-to-market implementation alongside the partner support are the main drivers we looked at when changing.

I was involved in the setup of the product. It was both easy and difficult to set up. However, thanks to the partner, it was more easygoing. There were a lot of people and it was useful to have somebody help as well.

We have a pretty big platform. It took two and a half months to implement the solution. That said, for our needs, it was pretty fast. We had to deal with multiple locations and we migrated everything to just one. We centralized the entire platform.

We had a great partner and planner involved.

For us, it makes more sense to have an on-premise platform rather than a cloud due to the cost. The cost-saving we have in the on-premises platform still is the driver.

We did consider public cloud servers before choosing PowerEdge Racks. We looked at servers for AWS, Azure, and others.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. We are quite satisfied.

It's a good scalable product. It's a good cost-saving product too. That aspect helps us as a company. In my experience, it's a pretty good implementation too. 

I'd advise new users to keep up with the timing of new deployments. That way, you can take advantage of new features. 

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.

The setup is hybrid right now. It was formerly strictly on-premise and we used it for our file storage and for our virtual machines.

Originally, it was purchased for strict file storage and access on-prem. However, when COVID hit, we ended up purchasing laptops for every single employee that we had. Having to use our new file storage device, which is no longer on-premises as they're now at home, was easy. That's why we went with a hybrid environment. We put a lot of the data into the cloud and backed it up in the on-premises file storage.

It allowed us to move some file storage that we had around. It allowed us to really look into what we had and what we were using. Looking at Apex, it is setting us up for when it will need a refresh or when it is at its end of life.

The most valuable aspects include hot swapping and the elasticity as far as being able to scale. We had a bunch of stuff on an old, existing EMC. The company was unaware that they had to keep the files that they had for so long. We realized that once we were meeting the seven-year mark and we could start purging some of those files, we had to scale down a little bit.

The initial purchase that we had was a little big, however, as we started adding more users that were working from home and had their own drive, OneDrive, we had to expand it a little bit. Dell was able to ship me bigger hard drives.

When it comes to running the latest high-demand applications, PowerEdge is good. The VMware that we had was almost end-of-life, so we had to upgrade it and Dell helped out with that quite a bit, putting it on our PowerEdge and assisting us with a lot of stuff that VMware didn’t. VMware just said, "Here. Here's your product. Good luck.” Dell was a lot more helpful. They had a lot of engineers that knew about that service that we were trying to tap into a little better.

The BIOS recovery was something we used because we had a huge power outage and a power strike when one of our air conditioners had a bad power surge run through it at our facility. Dell helped us rebuild our actual BIOS system in it, as one of the mirror arrays that we were using just wasn't being seen. We were afraid it was a hardware issue, however, it was really a BIOS issue that we couldn't see right off the jump. We’re glad Dell was there to help.

The solution's analytics helped to decrease production downtime by at least 30%. I'm in Arizona and down in Tucson we don't get that much downtime. We have a lot of battery backups, we have a generator system, and more. However, when it does happen, the analytics of it, as far as the trends on what months the monsoon season hits, it kept all in the logs.

The system management capabilities of PowerEdge helped increase stack productivity. We've had a little bit of turnover in our system admin department, however, having the ability to go back and look through the logs and see how users ended up using their home drive, their shared files, and their encrypted files really helped out my new guys coming on board.

The solution's accelerated GPUs help support demanding workloads in our organization. We had a couple of changing workloads due to the fact that when people shifted from home, they were hitting the server from a different angle. They were coming in off a virtual private network instead of being on-premises and the system didn't blink.

I’m not sure if PowerEdge helped to reduce data processing time in our organization as we don't crunch a lot. We do have a lot of videos coming in and a lot of video editing going on, so in that way, it does help.

The PowerEdge system management frameworks enable us to progress towards full automation. We knew what we were looking for when we refreshed this last model and we purchased a new server just from the analytics we got off the first one.

It helps me forecast better. We don't grow exponentially. Teachers are hard to come by, however, some will leave and some will stay. The business models are the same, yet they expect more. Now they want to do a video. They want to capture and record the videos and the Zoom meetings that they're doing, therefore, it's a little different.

It's more from the pandemic, however, the logistics part of it could be better. Getting an actual bare-bones server was a little difficult when we ordered it in beginning. I'm still waiting on the printers that I ordered last year as well. That's the only thing I would really say and I'm sure it has to do with the pandemic.

The latency of it is what we're running into, as our teachers do a lot of video captures, video teaching, Zoom, and Teams video conferencing, and their latency is getting worse with the public domain.

I've used the solution since I've been with the company, probably for the last three years.

The scalability is very good. There were different options that we could have gone to. We could either have gotten smaller hard drives and/or downsized if we needed to. They knew our business model was going to change when the pandemic hit.

We have about 650 end users on this particular solution and 80% of them are teachers. The rest are administrative professionals.

Currently, we are planning to put a new server that we have in the mix online and up and running with the PowerEdge server that we have. Now, with Apex and more coming out, we're looking to possibly pivot.

Technical support is very good. We had to call Dell technical support when our BIOS got corrupted and they were on the spot. They escalated us to tier two within 20 minutes. It was really quick.

Positive

We did previously use a different solution, however, I cannot remember what our large area network's device was.

Dell came in with a very competitive offer with the first model of storage that we got, so that's what my predecessor went to, and we kept it around.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We knew exactly where we wanted to put it in our array and how we wanted to set it up, what the power requirements would be, where it would fit on my battery backup system, and the plan for system recovery in case it had to be gracefully shut down. It was super easy.

When deploying PowerEdge, we didn't get a chance to use the automated server and OS deployment features.

The deployment was scheduled for six hours and it took three. 

We actually had to migrate users off of an older version that we had onto the new box that we had. The implementation strategy was all about really getting our users off the box and making sure nobody was trying to access it. After that, it was just migrating users over, setting up the new box, putting it online, and running tests.

For maintenance, normally we use a server admin, myself, and maybe one other developer that helps us with the syslogs on it. There are probably three of us altogether.

We used an integrated reseller for the deployment. They were amazing.

We had an issue with a brownout or a power strike and our BIOS got a bit corrupted, however, it was nothing that couldn't be recovered on the fly.

We've seen an ROI. I don't have any details offhand. I know when we first purchased it, we got a pretty good deal on it and we didn't know if it would actually meet end-of-life due to the usage that we had on it. However, it outperformed our metrics.

I'd advise others to use the pro services that come along with it, that are available for purchase with it. It helped us immensely. If you were to extend the service contract and get the pro level, it costs a bit more.

We did evaluate other options. When it's over a certain dollar amount, we have to go out and get at least four bids.

I can't remember the exact version we have. We just purchased a new Dell SAN.

We do not use PowerEdge for artificial intelligence applications yet. We're looking into it. Right now, a lot of the video data capture that we do is with children, school-aged children, and children in a preschool environment. We were thinking the AI might be able to help us where the teacher might not be looking. If they had a camera in the room to capture the relevant stuff that was going on as far as what the lesson plan was about that day, it might be helpful.

I have not had a chance to use the solution's iDRAC telemetry for monitoring PowerEdge system data and providing analytics, however, we're really looking into that right now. We got the new SAN going in and we'd like to monitor a little better.

We do not use the solution's CloudIQ for predictive analytic capabilities yet.

It is a very stable product. It's something that we use reliably for backups. It's something we use reliably for our main server for a long time and we'd definitely buy another.

My biggest takeaway is it's not as easy going straight to the cloud when you were an on-premises provider. If you are an on-premises provider and you have all your services on-premises, going to the cloud takes a couple of steps. It's not just one big jump.

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. If I could get the same amount of storage that I got three years ago now, I'd rate it ten out of ten. I'd order it as quickly as I did when we ordered it the first time.

We use it as our database solution and for ESXi hosting. We use the R7-30s, 7-40s, 8-40s, and 7-50s. Our whole company uses this solution and we have over 10,000 employees.

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

The PowerEdge system management frameworks have enabled us to progress towards automation. 

The Ormi product is the most valuable for me because it streamlines all the necessary information that can be viewed in one place. 

The iDRAC Telemetry that monitors PowerEdge system data and provides analytics could be a little bit more in-depth. Someone wanted more information on the RAM and the hard drives and we couldn't retrieve this information.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is very good and we can contact them at any time. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took a couple of minutes and involved five people who are system engineers. 

This is an expensive solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.