Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

We're having increased performance. That's one of the big reasons we went with these PowerEdge servers.

The iDRAC that comes with the systems is great. It allows us to scale out a lot faster than before.

PowerEdge servers are good for handling and evolving high-performance workloads. We get everything that we need.

The biggest needs within our company are performance, stability, and support. If and when something goes wrong hardware-wise, a quick resolution is always a wonderful thing to have.

We do not use Dell's memory in our PowerEdge environment. We do use them separately.

PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. The firmware updates that have been pushed out have reduced the amount of DIMM memory failures or false alarms. That's been really good. That's the main concern we have.

In terms of the iDRAC software, when selecting systems, especially multiple systems to upgrade, there's really no way to confirm specific systems that are selected. It'll just tell you a number and it's very vague. It says, "Hey, you're about to perform this action on X amount of systems." If it had more visibility, then that would provide more peace of mind for our team and everyone else who uses the iDRAC software as well.

We've been using these PowerEdge rack servers for about two years now.

The technical support is good.

Whenever we ask for clarification on an action plan, we get the required feedback so that we can make informed decisions on our end. We'd love it if they'd keep up with the process that they currently have.

We switched over to Dell as they were highly competitive in their pricing, and their specs were either identical or gave better performance than some of the other options we were looking at.

The pricing was extremely competitive, and it's one of the big reasons why we went with Dell.

We use the servers on multiple of our data centers located throughout the United States, and the performance and stability of these systems have been phenomenal.

We did not consider public cloud services before choosing PowerEdge DRAC services.

Performance-wise, hardware-wise, it is solid, however, it could use some improvements around iDRAC. Therefore, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

For those considering the solution, I would advise starting by doing some research. The system is incredibly stable and performs similarly to other systems that we're reviewing.

We use this solution as a host for clusters. We use 750, 740s, and 730s.

PowerEdge is able to run the latest high-demand applications for our use case. They host our clusters and facilitate the building of environments. 

We also like the iDRAC feature for monitoring system data and providing analytics. The newer iDRAC is a lot better than the older versions. 

The management features of this solution have been most useful.

We have experienced some challenges with iDRAC when upgrading firmware.

We have been using this solution for a couple of decades. 

I would rate the support for this solution a seven out of ten. 

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Implementation was done as a combination of the vendor and our internal reps.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for SAP and for other critical information that our customers need.

Our customers are really happy when we use PowerEdge because it improves the performance of their company. They also end up having more internal users or internal customers satisfied with solutions that they use in their company, such as SAP.

The system management capabilities of PowerEdge helped increase staff productivity by 50% for our latest client.

I've found the reliability, support, the capability to grow, and the ability to add other Dell solutions to be very valuable features.

As for security features, it's a good quality solution for the price. You can add different software or patches to have a better security solution.

It has helped reduce the data processing time by 30%.

The PowerEdge system management frameworks have enabled us to progress toward full automation when it comes to managing more.

The Industrial and healthcare areas both need improvement.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

The stability is really good.

It is scalable. You can start small and then add more products that allow you to increase the productivity of your company.

We have about 300 users and plan to upgrade the solution with more components.

We have not had a good experience with support. Technical support staff take too much time to resolve tickets. We have a super plus level of agreement, which means that the time of response is supposed to be four hours. The resulting time is supposed to be 48 hours. We sometimes see 72 hours go by with no solution provided to resolve the problem. So I would rate technical support and customer service at six on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

We replaced Dell technology because PowerEdge is much better.

The initial deployment was straightforward because we already had technical architects who knew how to deploy the solution.

The deployment took over a month.

We implemented it ourselves with a team of six to seven people including a technical architect, an SAP Basis engineer, technicians, and a security officer.

The price is good for the quality of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

We looked at Lenovo.

You should compare PowerEdge's time for response, the scalability of the solution, the licensing cost, and support to those of other brands.

Sometimes you try not to spend too much on technology, but there is a point at which it is necessary to invest in this solution because you will increase the productivity of your company. When you see the quote, remember that all that money can be recouped with the increase in production.

If you wait for too long, you may start having problems and lose productivity. You can really get hit hard with a loss of productivity. You have to determine the time to change the technology to a new one.

If I were to rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, I would rate them a nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use the servers for various use cases. A lot of our servers act as ESXi hosts that host our VMware infrastructure. We also have a lot of researchers that use them for their own computing, memory, and storage as well.

When it comes to running high-demand applications, we trust our Dell servers exclusively. Its overall stability and ease of use have helped to improve the way our organization functions.

I believe that our overall data processing time has been reduced, although it's hard for us to quantify that.

The most valuable feature is reliability. We rarely have any issues and because of this, Dell is our go-to for servers.

We make use of the encrypt-at-rest security feature, which allows us to keep our servers locked down in our data centers as best we can.

We used the CloudIQ feature for monitoring and it's pretty good overall. We have a challenge in our area because our IT is very broad and there is a lot of overlap. Other people's work is visible and we have a big environment, so there is a team of people that keep an eye on things.

I'd like to take the complexities out of all the different tools that surround it, like OpenManage. There's some different licensing and it gets a little wonky at times. Other than that, the product itself works fine. Rather, it's some of the management issues.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for approximately 15 years.

This is a pretty reliable product.

Dell's support is fantastic. We've never really had any problems with them.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

We are looking for some of the newer models to replace some of our older equipment. We may not have to have as many as before, because it's more efficient.

Once we get a server, we can have it up in a day. One person can do it unless it's a heavy server. In that case, we need two people to lift it. Almost anybody on our staff can deploy this server if it's needed.

We handle the deployment in-house.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

When you compare this product to using a public cloud, you definitely have to pay attention to what you're doing in a public cloud. This is because you're generally using a shared server with other people and there can be problems because of this.

We are currently working towards full automation when it comes to managing PowerEdge. It looks pretty good at this stage. It most definitely assists with the overall operations.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that Dell is a reliable partner. The product works well and you can't really go wrong with it. As the product changes over time, it's pretty seamless and you don't have to learn a lot of new things. After four years, it may only be slightly different.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution for our SAP system to catalogue our sales, sales products and pricing. We also use this solution for all Microsoft applications. 

The patches that are often released for this solution help us stay on top of our game, which is essential as we provide solutions to the government.

This solution keeps us up and running and reduces downtime. PowerEdge has helped us to reduce data processing time. The PowerEdge systems management frameworks have enabled us to progress towards full automation. 

The automatic updates provided in the system have been the most valuable. The notifications that get sent out help us keep on top of making sure security patches are updated weekly.

The iDRAC commentary embedded in this solution allows our IT department to detect problems whenever and wherever they arise. They are then able to resolve these problems from a remote location 80% of the time.

This solution does everything we need to do. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We have 35 employees who focus primarily on sales. 

The technical support for this solution is good. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The solution's deployment team that assisted are on top of their game. They are easy to contact and set it up fairly quickly.

The pricing for this solution is competitive compared to others on the market.

Our IT department have not had any complaints using this solution and have preferred its performance compared to what they used to use.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We use this solution for our on-premises infrastructure to mainly provide office support and data storage.

We use it for data storage and it allows for easy access to the data on-premises. It has helped increase staff productivity.

PowerEdge is one of the top solutions when it comes to the security features that it provides including firmware, drift protection, and systems management.

It's a pretty nice system. You can log in to iDRAC, you can look at the logs, the temperature, etc. Essentially, all of the metrics of the server are there, so you can get a complete view and immediately know what's going on.

One of the things that I've noticed is that over time, the system degrades, meaning that little things don't work. For example, the hard drive would need to be replaced or iDRAC would not be functioning properly. We may have to flash the firmware. It is not like some other hardware where it just runs without issues for four or five years. With Dell, generally, there are little hiccups here and there.

I've used PowerEdge Rack Servers on and off for about 20 years.

It's very stable. I would give it a ten out of ten. The system is pretty redundant, so we never really have any downtime.

We have about 250 users. It's used 90% in the company, in terms of our infrastructure. We do not plan to increase usage because we're moving more things to the cloud. We're trying to reduce our server footprint on-premises.

Dell's technical support is pretty good. I'd give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We've always switched between Dell and HP, depending on the current state and the cost. The reason for switching is primarily the cost involved.

The initial setup is not intuitive. The first one took a while, but after that, we were done within an hour.

When deploying the PowerEdge solution, we were able to use the automated server and OS deployment features, but I had to talk to Dell support. They had to walk me through it. However, once you do it once, it becomes very easy.

We implemented it ourselves with help from Dell's technical support.

For deployment and maintenance, we need one person.

When you compare public cloud solutions to PowerEdge in terms of cost, initially the cost of Dell servers or Dell technology was really high. However, right now it's on par and maybe even cheaper when we use Dell hardware. If we don't swap it out in three years and stretch it to four or five years, then we can get even more of an ROI versus cloud cost.

We've always chosen HP or Dell depending on the year, the product, and any promotions offered by the respective companies. We generally use Dell laptops, so by default we often go with Dell servers as part of the ecosystem.

I highly recommend Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; they are solid. If you do your due diligence and do your homework or your janitorial work, they'll never break.

I would give this solution a ten on a scale from one to ten.

I use a mixture of versions of this solution including R440 and R430.  I also use FX2S for the blade chassis and FC630 and 640 for the actual blade servers.

We use the blade solution as a host cluster environment for virtualization of multiple servers and the standalone R440 and 430 for best practice when we don't want to necessarily complete virtualization. We use physical servers in different locations in order to have different firewall contexts, so we can push data across. We use the physical servers as simulated distant ends in a test environment out at the actual sites.

This solution has helped us reduce our rack footprint. It reduced our power consumption including size and weight. For example, we could increase the number of systems we were deploying in Iraq if we needed to. 

The solution decreased the time it takes to deploy systems due to needing less hardware. When we started to manage all of our servers in a cluster, it increased our oversight management. Ease of management with a smaller hardware footprint has equaled faster deployment.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the fact that it is a reliable server and does the job we implemented it to do. 

We are leaning away from this particular product because Dell's VxRail solution makes us buy four nodes at a time which is not scalable. Other solutions such as Cisco offer more innovation on this front. 

The switching for this solution is lagging behind other products. Cisco has built the best iOS that other solutions need to match. Dell has recently done an overhaul to allow networking switches but it still can't scale the way we need it to. 

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

This is a stable solution. 

Blade servers are not scalable anymore.

The initial setup is not complex but it is counterintuitive, specifically the chassis. The FX2S chassis holds up to four half widths blades and has a pre-built two-module network card and eight ports that mirror each other.  

The PCIe slots on the back of the chassis are hardwired and challenging to set up.

We did not use the automated server of OS deployment features. We installed the hardware and then installed the software manually. We are a dark site. Dell could be a little bit more friendly to dark site management. There's a huge customer base out there that just cannot utilize a lot of their solutions in a classified environment.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. We pay a basic premium with a military premium on top of that. 

This solution has met my needs. We have not run with the latest versions of this solution due to security concerns. 

This solution has helped me to view the health and status of our environment in a user-friendly way. The TPM features have helped us a lot because, from a configuration management standpoint, there are trusted platform modules that operate consistently.

For anyone considering this solution, I would recommend looking into all the finer details to understand how it could be integrated. Ensure every facet of the solution is going to meet your needs.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

This solution is very easy to use. 

For every option, there is documentation with at least two lines of explanation.

You are provided with excellent instructions. 

They need to improve the support, as they are not very responsive, and they don't get back to you right away.

We have been working with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers for several years. 

It's a stable solution and we plan to continue using it.

Dell EMC PowerEdge is not very scalable. This is an area that can improve.

We have 389 users in our organization.

The critical issue is when you send them an email, you will not get a reply for two or three days.

They are happy to fix your issues but they are not very responsive.

We started when we had Windows 7 in 2012, and have now upgraded to Dell EMC.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It took two days to complete the installation.

We have one person to maintain it.

We had help from an integrator during our implementation. We have been using these integrators for five years.

It's a one-time licensing fee for the device and we pay a quota per year for the support.

We deploy both on-premises and on the cloud, but at this time we are using on-premise only because we have to get additional access to the cloud.

This is a good product. I would recommend it for small to mid-size companies, but not for large companies who manage several computers. The response time for their support could be faster.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.