Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

Dell PowerEdge R-Series supports our entire virtualization environment. VMware sits on top of PowerEdge, and we use VSAN within that. We also have a few application servers that sit separately on PowerEdge as well.

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I prefer the most include out-of-band support, which has improved significantly. iDRAC is an amazing product that has become more full-featured over time. Full access to pre-OS configuration is a great feature. Additionally, the simplicity of the PowerEdge platform physically makes it easy to take apart. Everything is very modular and nicely designed.

The benefits of these features for my company include that Dell PowerEdge R-Series is a solid compute platform. Nothing ever fails at this point very much. Occasionally a drive will fail, but that is easily resolved. Memory will fail and is easily resolved. We really have not had any issues that we experienced previously with other devices where we hit bottlenecks. We still have not seen that. Everything works amazingly. If there are issues, they are usually at the guest OS level and not the Dell PowerEdge R-Series devices themselves.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped to reduce unplanned production downtime significantly. Before we went with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I was not there, but I know that we were having major issues with our primary EMR platform because the physical servers we were using previously were underpowered for that use. As soon as we went to Dell PowerEdge R-Series, those issues resolved. That was huge for us.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved by adding more lights on the front. It would be awesome to get more than just the Dell logo lit up. I would appreciate seeing everything lit up. Just keep improving CPU and RAM and SSDs, and keep improving the general performance. I think that is all we really need. Stability has already reached a point where we do not need to worry about it the way we used to.

In my current role, for the four years I have been there, we have always had Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers set up.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has affected the overall flexibility of our operations and business positively. We are not hitting those bottlenecks anymore. CPU and RAM bottlenecks are nonexistent now, and we have had the same Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for about four or five years. We still do not see anything even with expansion and more VMs that are installed. Performance is still great. We have had some of our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, since storage is local, fill up to past 90 percent before and we still have not seen any degradation in performance, which is amazing.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support specifically for Dell PowerEdge R-Series as amazing. In the past, Dell was known for not having great support, but in the past few years they have been incredibly impressive. I have told Dell this directly because I have been so impressed with how good they are and how fast they get back to you. We have also had to use them for upgrades and we have had to delay upgrades for weeks at a time and there have never been any complaints or closed tickets. They have kept the tickets open the whole time. I have been largely very impressed with Dell's support and they are near the top of my list of good vendors with good support.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we were using another solution that I believe was not Dell. I was not there for that. The fact that our EMR was constantly crashing and we saw bottlenecks in both CPU and RAM made a change necessary. We went with Dell because Dell is a trusted company and it ended up being the right decision.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We used to have constantly crashing applications and servers within our previous devices. Now that Dell PowerEdge R-Series has been implemented, we do not see that same degradation in service and our EMR no longer crashes, which is the most important thing. It used to happen a lot and then it went down to nearly nothing.

My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing with Dell has been fairly simple. There are times where we went directly through Dell, and there are times where we went through partners. Either way, it usually goes pretty smoothly. I do not know exactly what licenses we got, but the purchase process and the deployment process have always been smooth. Dell or partners always have someone to help you deploy the actual software or the actual hardware, so it has always been pretty simple.

I was not around during the evaluation process, so I do not know what other solutions were considered before selecting Dell PowerEdge R-Series. I do not have details on that.

We do not currently have any AI workloads running on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers. Nothing yet. The plan is there. We have the GPUs ready to go. The GPUs are there and they are installed. We just have no localized AI yet.

Regarding whether using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce our total cost of ownership or TCO, that is a management question. I cannot answer that.

I assess the new Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for energy consumption as much better compared to previous devices that we had hypervisors on. There is much less power usage now. I can see through the UPS devices that they are connected to that there is not as much power consumption as there used to be in the past.

My impressions of Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers' impact on our company's sustainability goals are uncertain. I do not work in philanthropy, so I do not have strong opinions on that.

Downtime was reduced significantly. From what I have heard, downtime was probably at about 15 percent of total business hours, ranging from 10 percent to 15 percent of total business hours. It has dropped down to 0.05 percent. That is quite an improvement.

I would advise other companies considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series to go for it. Dell is a great company. Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are great. They are great for hypervisors as we use them for virtualization. It is a solid product. Things do not fail, which is what you want in any business. My overall rating for this product is 9 out of 10.

We have both the XE line servers in our data center that we're using for large language model. 

We also have, with our new fresh deployment going into stores, deploying four Nvidia L4 cards. We're doing inferencing at the edge for our Dell apps, for security stuff, for loss prevention. So a lot of AI work is going into that on those Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

Our partnership with Dell provides a consistent platform across our 1800 locations.

Dell is a critical partner for our company. We have a great partnership. They have excellent sales and technical teams, and their long-term support teams. They are very engaged with us. They help us work through things and they're also very competitive on pricing. It has been at or above industry grade for the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

I would increase the life cycle management and those life cycle management tools. I know that's a big focus of Dell now with their private cloud experience. And then also with the enhancements to OME that are coming down the line.

Speaking on the XE series specifically, the internal service to the system, if you need to get to a DIMM or anything similar, requires that you remove all three risers and the storage controller. It's not very internally service friendly.

We've been deploying Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since 2021.

It has been at or above industry grade for the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

Everything from our original VX Rail stuff scaling out in our data center to just our edge platforms, which is a much smaller, four-node cluster, hasn't been an issue scaling.

We have dedicated support. We have a great representative, LaShonda, who helps us navigate that. We also have a TAM, a full-time TAM, Brandon, who does a great job of working with us to meet and talk about our concerns and issues that we see. 

It deserves a rating of ten out of ten. We have a great sales team. If we have questions, they're available 24/7. If we need escalations, they're there, they make it happen. We definitely enjoy that aspect of it.

Positive

It went through RFP and that gets cycled through. All the big players, HP, Dell, Lenovo, all those vendors get sorted through.

We've had no problem with the deployment of Dell. After deployment, we have joined Dell's managed services as well. 

We're getting a lot of efficiencies and increasing our density, especially as the product line matures. We've been able to shrink down our core counts to reduce our licensing at the edge. We are definitely seeing ROI on our investment.

The pricing in our case is very competitive and very good.

I can't think of anything specific to add regarding alternate solutions.

Rack is the model we're using and the kind of functionality we're employing. 

I would give Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an overall rating of eight out of ten.

All of our server infrastructure is PowerEdge, and it's all HCI PowerEdge.

By having Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, we wanted density. We wanted to have a small power and cooling footprint. That's why we have PowerEdge and VxRail.

The most valuable feature is OpenManage. We get a lot out of OpenManage because we have a sprawling infrastructure with around 100 data centers, and managing all of those separately is challenging. The automation built into OpenManage for firmware upgrades and life cycle management really helps us out.

I recommend not locking the GPU behind a different license for iDRAC. We've talked to the product team, and it hasn't changed yet. I don't understand why they do that because you can't get very many metrics out of iDRAC Enterprise, as you have to go to the Data Center for a GPU, which seems pointless.

I wouldn't change anything else since I haven't had any other headaches with the platform. I find the pricing and licensing on par with the market.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers at my current company for six years, and beyond that, probably 20.

The stability and reliability are extremely high. We rarely have failures even in places that aren't necessarily maintained. It's a workhorse.

Scalability is a big factor for us, along with time to deployment and ROI, which are all pretty significant.

We have 26,000 people in our organization, with about 400 people per venue.

I work with customer service and tech support all the time. My impressions from working with them on the PowerEdge side are very high. We've had some challenges around VxRail after the Broadcom stuff, but I have nothing bad to say about PowerEdge. 

I would rate their support an eight overall because it's still kind of a challenge for us. We're not tech direct currently, so it's challenging to call in and deal with the script response of 'have you tried turning it off and on again?' rather than getting escalated quickly. Better escalation would be nice, and quicker escalation would be appreciated.

Positive

Deploying the product is super easy. It's going to get easier, but for us, it's simply dropping it in a rack, powering it, networking it, and everything gets provisioned for what we need pretty quickly.

We have seen ROI. While I can't share metrics at scale, we have replaced a couple of venues with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and replaced our VxRail. We project to save somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 million over the next three years when we get the rest of them done.

It's pretty much on par.

We evaluated Lenovo and Supermicro. Lenovo didn't have their eggs in the basket for any way to manage at scale, and Supermicro is kind of the same, plus there's just a big relationship with Dell that we can't ignore.

In terms of AI initiatives, a lot of our potential use cases revolve around players, as we're trying to figure out how we can leverage AI to better their experience, such as checking into the bay and giving them advice as they're going through their bay journey. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers can help with that because it is the platform our whole business runs on - it's the foundation. 

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten, as I never give a ten.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for as long as they have existed, in my opinion, so approximately 20 years. I am involved in working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series by doing system designs for our customers, choosing the systems, and since we also operate the systems in the data center for our customers, I also handle the operations.

My use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are completely mixed, since we come from the publishing sector. Some are publishing systems, image editing systems, image systems, image archiving systems, web servers, and database servers, so really across the entire landscape.

I could not really say offhand which application I find the most valuable. As I said, I have been working with them for a very long time, and system management works very well.

System management works well for us in operations, and that is of course a key point for us. Otherwise, I would not know a single point that I could highlight.

It works so well due to our fairly long experience with it, and even when a new version comes out, we are integrated into it relatively quickly. Integration into third-party systems, monitoring, and other systems is also quite good.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series improves our company by supporting our work and our operations. The company itself does not become better or worse just because I would use another manufacturer. However, I have had very good experiences with Dell systems, and the price-performance ratio has always been great. In that respect, we have been quite satisfied over the years.

I cannot really say how Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved. The range of systems is quite large, from small to large, from one socket to two sockets and four sockets. There has always been a suitable system for us for each use case. The choice of CPUs, RAM configuration, and modifications is very large, partly even a bit too large, because I sometimes get lost in the configuration options, but nothing negative really stands out to me at this point.

In the server environment, it is probably more secondary, but what might actually be a small added value for Dell PowerEdge R-Series would be if there were also a server line that had higher graphics performance out of the box. For topics regarding terminal services, Citrix, and similar applications, I can install appropriate GPU accelerators, but sometimes that is already oversized. If the server itself had more graphics performance and GPU onboard, that would be an absolute added value, as I would have many use cases where I could use that, because the next step, an extra GPU with the licensing that comes with it, is a completely different cost level.

I have been working in this field for 33 years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has always grown well with my company's needs in the past. We also have customer additions and departures, of course, whereby for the additions, relatively quickly relatively large quantities of systems must be procured. That has always worked well so far, and the delivery and the whole handling with Dell was always top-notch. There were no problems.

I would rate the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as very good, with few defects. There is sometimes a defect in a system, especially since we have a large number, but that is really marginal.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series products grow with my needs.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable for the company's long-term plans.

It fits because the portfolio of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is quite large. Even if we now got a relatively small customer who does not have the financial background to run large systems, I would still find something suitable in the Dell portfolio. That is different with some other manufacturers, but here the range is very broad, so that I can actually find the right thing for every use case and every budget.

For a company like mine, smaller in size, Dell PowerEdge R-Series contributes to growth and operational success through customers using more services or new customers joining. It supports our operations, and due to the reliability and good price-performance ratio, it helps, of course, but the company does not grow solely because of that.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service as a nine. The support is good, and of course, we have little contact because we have few problems, but I have only heard positive things from my employees.

Positive

Compared to previous servers from HP, I would say it had a better price-performance ratio back then. However, today I no longer make the comparisons. The manufacturers all use similar components from similar suppliers. For CPUs, it is Intel and AMD, and there are not many alternatives, so the prices overall are probably similar. However, I have always had good experiences with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, so there is no reason to benchmark other manufacturers again and make a general switch, because we also have a large stock of Dell systems.

I used another solution for similar needs many years ago when we had HP systems in parallel with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, which are similar in their series to the Dell systems. However, that was so long ago that I cannot really verify or reference it anymore.

I no longer use those systems simply due to a strategic decision. We also had a small share of Fujitsu systems, and managing three system managements and three patch managements becomes too big for a small or medium-sized company. That means we decided to focus on one manufacturer, and in this case, it was Dell because my experience with the systems and the hardware was better than with the others, and the price-performance ratio was also somewhat better.

I was not involved in the deployment or initial setup of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but I was involved in the sizing and procurement.

I have not seen a return on investment through Dell PowerEdge R-Series that can be measured in any way with data. We have a return on investment, otherwise our business model would not be profitable, but I could not give any exact figures. It can certainly be quantified, but it is not measured in detail. However, I am more the technical part of the whole story. That may be measured in other areas by our controlling, but I actually cannot prove it.

When I think about the pricing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series licensing, I see that the systems have certainly gone up quite a bit in price compared to about ten years ago. The technology behind it justifies the price accordingly. Purchasing a server nowadays is already different, purely financially, than a few years ago, but that may be similar in other areas. Software is also not exactly cheap.

At the moment, there are no AI initiatives in my company, and Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not support AI initiatives in any way. That may come in the future, though, as AI is certainly a topic at our company as well. However, it is purely in the application area and not actively operated by us ourselves. We are still waiting to see in which direction it goes and where use cases arise for our customers.

My company is not very big in terms of employees, as we have 60 employees. Customer base wise, we are at three to four thousand workplaces now.

I would not necessarily say that Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features specifically tailored to the needs of small or medium-sized businesses, but due to the modularity and different series, depending on company size, there is actually something for every need. If only high-end systems were on offer, then I would certainly look for another supplier, because we are more in the mid-range, such as R760 and R770 in various expansion stages. That is our bread-and-butter system. High-end systems, four sockets, or larger configurations are rather rare in our use cases.

I do not use performance indicators or benchmarks to measure Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

I cannot name a specific example where the product has improved my business outcome, as nothing comes to mind right now.

I would rate this review with a rating of nine.

My main use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are virtualization, database, and web applications.

Dell PowerEdge plays a role in my company's AI initiatives as we have started the initiative. We are not fully there yet, but we are learning as we go with all the PowerEdge series. We are still trying to start getting more AI platform for next year.

In my AI initiative, I see Dell PowerEdge R-Series playing a role in the more exploratory phases. Once the data is fed into it, it evolves and learns the data and then tells us how to behave from a scientist point of view and from the user perspective.

The feature of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate the most is the flexibility, the expansions, and the resiliency. These features benefit my company because fewer hardware problems result in more uptime for the users. It helps everyone in a 24/7 operational environment.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be improved by expanding the slots and local disks. This is the main area for improvement because I have many environments where I need local space, and the slots limit how much I can accomplish.

In my role with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I have been using it for approximately 15 years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as decent, although we did experience some downtime, crashes, or performance issues. The 740 model had some problems, but as we worked with back engineering, they understood the issue. This made it better when we got the 760s and new series, which performed very well.

The problem was mainly CPU related, involving Intel and Dell firmware.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales well with the growing needs of my company. We have hundreds, probably close to 500 or 600 Dell PowerEdge R-Series 760 units, and we can perform vertical and horizontal scaling without issue. It fits right in with our infrastructure.

I would rate customer service and technical support a 10 out of 10 because the technical support is fantastic. When I call them, they are always responsive. They conduct working sessions with me, which is very helpful. Additionally, I have a local presence of Dell representatives on-site, which facilitates things for me.

Positive

Before using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we had an IBM solution, but it was very limited at one percent adoption.

I considered other solutions in my journey to switch. We used to be an HP shop, and then we switched to HP for the V-series and other solutions.

The deployment experience of Dell PowerEdge R-Series was very smooth with no issues. I run it out of the box with a few clicks and it is done.

The biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that we use them longer. Normally, our lifecycle is five years, but sometimes we have extended it up to seven years on the same hardware with no issues. This allows us to take a more long-term approach rather than having to replace hardware every three to five years.

Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I would say it is industry standard. I would not call it super expensive, and Dell is generous with discounting. They help us accommodate what we need, and they are very good about it.

I have evaluated other CPU vendor systems, and AMD was pushing harder in the earlier phases, but it never went anywhere. We pretty much stick with Intel.

The selling point for Intel is that we were accustomed to it. Bringing new solutions into the environment meant migrating everything, including application reliability and performance, which was too much effort. We had to stay with it, and AMD lagged behind in certain aspects.

I manage a team of solution architects, and we design Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for end user customers. My main use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series are virtualization hosts and basic compute.

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate most are reliability, support, and iDRAC.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce unplanned production downtime when designed appropriately. Although all hardware experiences failures occasionally, Dell's 4-hour support enables us to minimize downtime, and with proper design, we can essentially eliminate downtime.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has affected the overall flexibility of our operations and business. With appropriately designed servers, there is flexibility to meet the needs of the business. We design for both planned and unplanned growth, and IT departments are often asked to support new initiatives from other lines of business within the organization. Appropriately designed solutions help deliver whatever the business requires.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers has helped reduce my total cost of ownership by eliminating downtime and being able to support the evolving needs of the business. As workloads evolve to containers or AI, the flexibility in servers to add GPUs or other components has been fantastic.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved in several areas. Moving from 16th generation to 17th generation, there was a drop in some flexibility. When 17th generation Dell PowerEdge first launched, I liked the idea of having two OCP cards available, but we could not mix and match what we needed to fit various designs. At launch, not many PCI Express card options were available. It is fantastic that servers are moving to 100 and 400 Gig Ethernet. However, many small customers do not need 400 Gig Ethernet, and I was unable to add more 25 Gig ports at launch, though I believe this is now possible.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for 20 years.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as fantastic. The 4-hour part dispatch is excellent compared to some competitors that offer next business day support.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, my customers worked with Supermicro, which is very easy to displace because of reliability and support issues. We have customers with Lenovo servers, which I consider one of our biggest competitors, primarily based on cost.

I have seen ROI with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

One example of ROI is our work with AMD, where we are refreshing many older 14th generation Intel servers with 17th generation AMD servers. We are able to fit the same workload on fewer hosts. This reduces footprint, which reduces power and cooling, and it reduces licensing costs. AMD is delivering fantastic improvements in terms of core count and clock speed compared to Intel, so being able to do more with less has been valuable.

My experience with pricing, setup, cost, and licensing over the last six to nine months has been challenging because of AI data centers consuming significant resources. Component availability has been a real challenge. A server today costs probably two to three times the price of the exact same build a year ago. I work with many SLED customers, including city, county, school districts, and universities, and they must submit budgets a year in advance. We submit and work on proposals in September so they can plan for their July 1 budget. Quotes are only good for 14 days, and we are trying to predict costs nine months in advance, which has been a challenge.

The other solutions I considered before Dell PowerEdge R-Series include HPE and Cisco, though Cisco seems to be moving away from servers. Lenovo is moving into the space that Cisco may be evacuating. I consider Lenovo the biggest competitor at this time.

Some of our customers have competitive solutions that are not as reliable or have poor support, making them very easy to replace with a superior Dell PowerEdge R-Series solution.

The benefits I have seen from running AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers include cost advantages compared to running those same workloads in the public cloud.

I assess Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for energy consumption by noting that Dell has power calculators, which allow us to know power requirements before servers ship. We are able to appropriately plan power and cooling requirements for the data center whenever there is a new deployment.

Regarding Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers' impacts on my organization's sustainability goals, this question is probably more applicable in the EU and other places where carbon footprint measurements are being tracked, and I am uncertain if it applies to the customer segment that I primarily focus in.

I give this review a rating of 10.

My company's use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series include virtualization, backup, and administrative tasks, such as management and patch management.

For small or medium-sized companies, VX-Rail, which is based on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, has definitely contributed to growth and business success. We have been able to use significantly more storage, the systems became much faster, and thanks to redundancies, downtimes have dropped to zero. We haven't had any major IT outages for six years now thanks to Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series definitely has features specifically tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. iDRAC helps the local administrator monitor the system, temperatures, system status, and similar metrics. It reports to different systems, and the adaptability of the system and its manageability is very good.

The feature I consider the most valuable about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is iDRAC, which is a very important system for remote management, allowing me to control, monitor, and manage the server. Apart from that, the product quality is enormous, and failures are virtually non-existent. Support services from Dell are very good, and it's consistently positive. It's basically always a well-rounded package.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has improved my company, even though it's difficult to measure whether there was an improvement since we define our workloads ourselves. Downtimes are minimized, even though none have occurred so far, but when they do, they are very short thanks to the appropriate support services. I can always rely on the systems; they're always available, and in terms of support, I always quickly reach someone who can help me further without any problems.

Nothing comes to mind spontaneously about what could be improved with Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

I actually find nothing currently missing in this area because you can configure the servers accordingly when ordering, and you get everything you need in that sense.

There's not much about the support that I could still improve; there was this one isolated case where I had an issue and they couldn't really help me, but otherwise, I think overall, I'm very satisfied. The nine is just to ensure they don't forget to keep making an effort; I couldn't name anything specific.

I find nothing specific that needs to be improved, but I agree there is still room for improvement.

I have been working in this field for twenty-two years, regardless of the position I currently have.

Regarding reliability and stability, I can confirm that I don't experience crashes, outages, or performance issues. Sure, things can fail, and anything can break. That's why, as an IT administrator, I build in redundancies. Hardware failures have not led to any work stoppage, so I have full satisfaction in this area.

Dell products grow with the needs of the company and are scalable for our long-term plans. The projects we've done with Dell so far are always set up to provide scalability. In those projects, they look at the current workload to size the products sensibly and ensure there are options available for further growth, whether that's through adding more hard drives, expanding network cards, or adding graphics cards for other workloads—all are possible.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series grows with the needs of the company, and I have expanded it at some point.

The expansion works perfectly, and it was problem-free.

Support services from Dell are very good, and it's consistently positive.

I always quickly reach someone who can help me further without any problems.

Compared to the previous servers, the support services were worse back then. Dell servers are naturally more expensive because the support is included in the price, but you know what you're getting for it.

I would rate Dell's support in general as a nine or ten.

That's also the rating for Dell PowerEdge R-Series support in this case.

Positive

What distinguishes Dell PowerEdge R-Series from other servers is my previous experience with servers from a small German distributor called ICO, which were more or less self-built and couldn't really compete with Dell in terms of quality and support services. I haven't really had servers from other major players like HP or Lenovo in my hands so far.

I had another solution before from the German manufacturer ICO, somewhere in southern Germany, who supplied us with servers.

I switched because it was a project to move into virtualization; we hadn't used that before. That was around 2010 or 2012, and the existing provider couldn't offer us anything good there, so together with Dell, we set up a good project to create a virtualization environment.

Our system infrastructure used to be set up on individual servers, referred to as terminal servers for our employees. Thanks to the VX-Rail series, we were able to make that fully redundant. It was at least as performant, if not faster, and we have gained 100% fail-safety. Before, outages were factored in—if there had been a failure, we would have had a full day of downtime, which we no longer need to plan for.

I was involved in the deployment and setup as well.

I find it very difficult to quantify whether I have seen a return on investment by using the new Dell servers compared to before.

However, from my gut feeling, I can definitely say it has been worth it financially to switch. Through process optimization, faster workloads, functions, and scalability, we have definitely gained, and we didn't have to buy additional individual servers—we could simply scale up within the infrastructure without having to throw a lot more money at it.

It's difficult to estimate how long it took until that return on investment, time to value, was reached. For what we bought last year, it will definitely still take some time; I think it will take about two to three years until the full ROI should be reached.

I am very satisfied with the pricing since I order directly from Dell itself and not through a system integrator, placing me in a very attractive price range for the servers. Of course, a lower price is nice, but it's not something I really need to focus on.

I would say the pricing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is fair; you're not being ripped off. Licensing is always a bit of an issue when it comes to third-party vendors. For example, VMware at Broadcom was a big topic in IT last year due to the enormous price increases, and we paid four times the price for licenses at the end of last year. Otherwise, Microsoft is priced normally, where you usually still get a special offer to save another 100 euros, but in a complete project, that usually doesn't make a big difference.

I did consider other solutions before deciding on Dell and obtained other quotes.

What stood out to me with the others is that all the big manufacturers are comparable in that sense; they may differ in software or support services. From my experience in the small-business space, I can say that Dell is actually the best in terms of support, followed by HP, and only behind that comes Lenovo. I've had support cases with all of them in the small-business segment.

We do have AI initiatives in our company, but they are outsourced; we don't have any AI developers or similar in-house, so nothing is running locally on Dell PowerEdge R-Series either.

Everything related to AI is outsourced for us, and we are only end users in that sense.

My company has around one hundred employees.

I can provide a specific example where Dell PowerEdge R-Series has noticeably improved business operations. My overall rating for this review is nine out of ten.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series serves as a platform to house research studies and enable researchers to conduct clinical research. There are AI tools that the researchers run. For example, R is an AI-enabled statistical analysis tool. There are several AI-enabled products being run on Dell PowerEdge R-Series platform device.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable. We have around a few terabytes of storage, however. it can be expanded as it has the capacity to accept more storage. This makes us comfortable knowing we can add more storage internally without having to use external cloud solutions. 

The system effectively meets our workload requirements. We currently have about 60 to 70 users, and we can accommodate more users without performance issues. The data storage and retrieval capabilities are perfect. It is essentially a decent, high-speed performing device.

The physical design could be improved as it is heavy and quite large when racked. They could improve by making it less heavy while adding more external features, monitoring mechanisms, and indicators. 

Regarding the inbuilt storage, there are some constraints as we can only use certain models of storage. The storage capacity range could be expanded to help us configure data storage more broadly. These improvements might be addressed in future models.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series in my current role for just over three years. I have been in the industry for over 20 years.

The workload varies depending on the day, however, it never reaches the full capacity of Dell PowerEdge R-Series device. While we always consider future scalability, we have never utilized the device to its full potential. Currently, the workload is around half of what the machine can handle.

The pricing is a little bit higher, however, for the support you get, it's worth it.

Positive

Dell has been our preferred technical partner for years, and their support infrastructure is superior with a five-year warranty.

The previous system went out of warranty, and we received funding. This allows us the option to upgrade the servers. We will continue to use the old machine for alternative purposes while upgrading the existing system.

We have already seen returns with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. The number of users, entrepreneurs, and influencers who use the product to store data, conduct analysis, utilize the machine's power, present studies, and produce results in the public domain creates a cascading effect. Our previous Dell PowerEdge R-Series computer was about six to seven years old, and we saw its full benefit before getting a new one. There has definitely been a positive return on investment.

The pricing is slightly higher compared to other vendors and providers. However, it is worth it because of the support received from Dell. The peripheral spares and parts are reliable, and I can put complete trust in Dell PowerEdge R-Series rather than buying a similar product for less money. The pricing is slightly higher yet worthwhile, particularly for running industrial applications on an industrial-grade platform.

We considered HP, Lenovo, and another provider. One competitor was very competitive in pricing, but their specifications were not as convincing. Dell has been our preferred technical partner for years, and their support infrastructure is superior with a five-year warranty, which other vendors did not offer.

As an IT officer, I maintain both hardware and software. I install software, set up hardware interface, and manage storage in the server. 

My responsibilities include everything from installation and configuration to maintaining data security. We use rack servers, and three months ago, I received a new Dell PowerEdge R-Series 7625 rack server to replace the old 7250 model. 

We found the right model with the appropriate configuration for our workload requirements. The system handles statistical analysis workload for 50-60 users effectively. The newer device has improved monitoring capabilities and fault indication panels that alert us about potential storage issues. I am still exploring additional features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.