Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

Our main use case right now for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is hypervisor usage for virtualization.

One of the great things about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the racking system, specifically the actual rapid rails for easy installation. After that, it's the reliability and support that stand out. 

The rapid rail system is valuable. We have staff working at night to perform installations, and the nature of our business involves real-time transactions with changes made outside of regular hours. 

Having the rapid rail system is invaluable. Good support is also crucial due to the nature of our business, which requires timely assistance to maintain system uptime and redundancy.

The only aspect that might raise it to a ten is the response time for quote turnaround; it used to be one day, however, it now seems to take longer since the merger of Dell and EMC.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for 25 years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales with my company's growing needs, and we have definitely expanded usage over the years. While our server environment has grown, there has also been some consolidation, which has been due to the success of the technology allowing for vertical scaling. 

Key considerations include the impact on our data center, so we focus on increasing compute power and supporting more applications with reduced density.

The support from Dell has always been very good, and the performance and reliability of the systems have been excellent over the 25 years I've been working with all the different generations of PowerEdge. 

I would rate Dell support an average of eight to nine out of ten. My assessment extends beyond just PowerEdge, yet particularly for PowerEdge, the support has always been excellent. 

As a long-standing customer, we have established a relationship that allows us primarily to skip level one and go straight to level two support, which makes a significant difference.

Positive

We have evaluated other server vendors during large technology refreshes, yet we've consistently returned to Dell. The primary reasons we stick with Dell include cost—both upfront and over five years—and comprehensive support that covers both hardware and hypervisor needs, offering a valuable one-stop shop, especially since we have a smaller team.

I have definitely seen a return on my investment in Dell PowerEdge R-Series. Typically, we run most systems on a five-year life cycle; however, we often run our Dell PowerEdge R-Series into years six and seven, which suggests strong financial returns beyond five years.

Pricing has been positive. In the early days, we would have had our own local agreements at discount levels. And now with our parent US bank, we're accessing global discounts. So it's been pretty good in that space. They have been transparent and have been working with us to make sure we're getting good value.

My advice for others considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series would be to look beyond just the hardware and system reliability or support to its manageability, as Dell OpenManage has seen various enhancements and is typically provided for free, which adds great value. 

I would rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine out of ten.

We specifically outline our use cases of Dell PowerEdge R-Series as using it for VMware virtualization and databases running bare metal.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series benefits my company. It provides superior price performance compared to other vendors. 

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate the most are the central management and the surrounding software as they're integrated and easy to use. 

It's supporting growth and operational success. We're buying more and more PowerEdge R-Series instead of other vendors like Cisco and HP, and we're growing with additional hardware.

Dell PowerEdge has features that specifically cater to the needs of small or medium companies. It's the cost-effectiveness and good quality of the product that make the difference.

I would recommend Dell PowerEdge R-Series enhance more features such as AI. We're not there yet. 

Additionally, reduced cabling and improved power consumption management would be beneficial improvements.

I've been working in my current field for 25 years and I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for four years.

Regarding stability and reliability, the software performs excellently and the hardware has proven robust. We haven't needed to replace any hardware components in four years of operation.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series scales with the growing needs of my company as we add more servers and expand the clusters, making the process straightforward.

Our company has 7,000 people.

The customer service and technical support are exceptional, with fast response times and prompt solution delivery. 

I would rate the customer service and technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before choosing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I used Cisco UCS and HP servers, however, we have now moved exclusively to Dell.

The deployment is very easy. 

The biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the relatively low initial investment and maintenance contract renewal costs compared to other vendors, making it more economical overall.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing have been very competitive compared to other vendors, which influenced our decision to choose Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

The main difference between Dell PowerEdge R-Series and Cisco is that Cisco offers better management perspective due to its concentrated nature. 

We use Dell PowerEdge R-Series, where we can utilize standalone servers rather than blades or a managed solution.

My advice to other companies considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series is to try the proof of concept and experience its excellent performance. 

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is digitizing and processing of data, but I can't say more. I can't be more specific.

The benefits my company has realized from using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers range from collating information to simulating different physical objects such as antennas and radar type applications.

What I find valuable about Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the adaptability to configure, based on one or multiple processors, taking advantage of the number of cores, the ease by which it works with the Tensor Cores of the GPUs, and that's the most value in terms of processing speed and large scale problems. 

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers play a role in our company's AI initiatives, however, that's a new area for us. We've been exploring the idea of collaborating, in terms of how we can leverage AI for our data processing, and more importantly to better be able to predict different scenarios. But I'm not involved in that aspect of it just yet.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could be improved in areas such as cooling. I've seen some demos of Dell working with Vertiv to manage things such as that, so a combination of air cool and liquid cool. 

That's one aspect. The other aspect is the form factor; it's pretty big, takes up a lot of space. However, as the technology of the GPUs improves, we could probably do the same workload with less add-ons, and that would simplify that problem. From what I've seen here, Dell is already working with partners to address these concerns.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers in my organization for about five years.

Reliability was a big issue for me when I switched to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The previous solution had reliability issues. 

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale with the growing needs of my company. It works since we can deploy images quickly. We can hot swap things. As we scale, it's just a matter of having the vision to have enough space and physical infrastructure to do that. As far as the server resources and software resources, it's pretty easy.

I assess support from Dell as excellent; what I most appreciate is the regional support. At the enterprise level, there's always someone to talk to, to reach out to. 

The sales reps stay in the loop and they constantly stay in touch. It's fairly easy to pick up a phone and call someone and get to the right place. What I appreciate is even if they don't know or they're not immediately sure of a solution to our problems, they'll quickly point us in the right direction.

Positive

Before selecting Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, I didn't have such good luck with HP. HP Enterprise doesn't work for me. I've had some successes with custom-built servers, but in terms of price, eventually at scale, they become cost-prohibitive. That's one of the reasons why we moved towards the Dell solution over the years. In terms of cost, reliability, the ability to work directly with them to spec different systems and get them supplied on a decent lead time works. The other vendors don't work so effectively.

The deployment is easy. I can I can dump images on the server and just send it off and install it. It's hot swappable in a sense, the way we had it configured. It's very easy.

The speed of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is valuable to me. The benefit for higher speed and more accurate results is less development time and faster time to market in some aspects, and better return on the investment overall. 

In my immediate case for antenna analysis, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer a reduction from days of computing to half a day or hours. It's ten-times improvement when combining processor cores and Tensor Cores in the same form factor. In terms of radar analysis, we can process more objects; it's four-times improvement in the number of objects we can keep track of at the same time.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is somewhat skewed. In the beginning, we used a lot of resources, in terms of dollars, to try to do everything ourselves. What we're finding over the years is Dell works with other partners to make that easier, so we can actually save a lot of time by having other people with the right expertise do things. That's not so much an issue anymore because we've figured out how to keep our costs moderate by working with Dell directly and their partners.

I did have another solution addressing the same needs before Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, and that's where the competition comes in. 

My role in using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is to figure out what the system needs for the work, or for the processing that we need and assist with purchasing of that stuff. On a technical level, I'm also collecting the data from our instruments and making sure that data is processed to provide usable, actionable information.

My advice to other companies who are considering Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is definitely to get directly with Dell. Get direct contact with the support group and that will get you to the engineering level. Dell will work with you to develop and spec a system. Once you spec it, if your ambition is to scale and grow, that can always be part of it. That initial, direct working relationship with Dell is my best recommendation of where to start. Trying to do it on your own, you won't necessarily understand. You may understand the current technology, yet you may not understand where that technology is going or the vision of Dell. Dell can show you that vision, and you can now architect a system that takes advantage of that in the future to minimize your replacement costs down the road. So before you do anything, pick up the phone and start working with one of the engineers or application engineers; that works best.

I'd give Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a rating of ten out of ten. Those guys are easy to talk to and easy to work with.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is used as an all-purpose server or ESXi host for our major use case.

The management software is the most valuable capability in Dell PowerEdge R-Series, as these functions are my favorites. It is beneficial for the organization. A server is a commodity, and there is not really anything special about it. What makes it special is the software used for managing those devices. The management software is quite mature compared to others. Except for that, it is just a commodity. There is not a big difference between them, regardless of whether you use HPE or Cisco or any other vendor. The benefits are evident in the management capabilities.

Several years back, we wanted improvements, but that was mostly related to the management tools. We were going in the right direction of orchestration where we were missing some features. When you have several data centers and you have one manager of managers on top of that sitting, being able to orchestrate the whole environment would be beneficial. The scaling of the management tools was something we were aiming for, and at that time it was not so mature. It was not possible to use it. I believe that has changed, but I am not certain whether it is completely available. The orchestration aspect is the only potential improvement area from my perspective. Since I am not working hands-on, I cannot recall other specific issues.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for a couple of years already, approximately longer than five years.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is rather stable based on my experience and my colleagues' feedback regarding stability and reliability.

The scalability is quite good with the product portfolio from Dell. There are not significant limitations, though scaling can be expensive.

Overall, the customer service is good. We are just starting to deploy bigger amounts of Dell servers, so it is too early to make a complete judgment. The support from the vendor is good, though it could sometimes be better.

Neutral

There is no advantage compared to other vendors when tracking return on investment. I cannot share specific data points or examples of ROI.

The list prices are overkill. At the end, it is about the quantity that a customer consumes and the final price that they receive. It is about contracts, discounts, and other factors. The pricing is fairly competitive, though not particularly overpriced.

The pricing reflects the market. The solution is comparable to other vendors. We maintain a constant balance between Dell and HP, keeping both vendors. The pricing is competitive in comparison with other vendors in the market.

I am an end customer and user of Dell. We work with Dell as a general supplier for compute, storage, backup technologies, and many other things. We work with PowerProtect Data Manager. We mostly use compute solutions such as servers and the VxRail platform. We have some SAN switches from Dell. The focus is mostly on compute and storage products. We have some backup appliances from them, which are specific configurations of servers rather than Data Domain appliances. The deployment is on-premises, and we purchase directly from Dell Technologies. The company size is more than 60,000 people, making us a large company. Dell PowerEdge R-Series likely has a good portfolio for various customer sizes. We have used Intel processors for more than 20 years as a standard CPU. Nowadays there are some initial trials with AMD, but it is too early to make a comparison or statement about which processor is better. The management tools and marketing are different between vendors. The way companies support global customers differs as well. The product itself is a commodity, as servers do the same thing with the same CPU and memory. There are no really significant advantages or disadvantages between either platform. What makes Dell PowerEdge R-Series special is the vendor team behind it, the support provided, and the management software. The team, vendor support, and management capabilities are what differentiate Dell PowerEdge R-Series from other vendors.

Our use cases for the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involve reselling the servers to our customers as a Dell VAR reseller, and internally, we use them for our own lab environments, testing, and evaluating the servers for our customers in advance to see how they're doing.

The most valuable feature we find in the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the iDRAC. We value the iDRAC for its out-of-band management for the servers; servers are servers for the most part, but the iDRAC is the bread and butter of the PowerEdge server series. The ability to do everything through that iDRAC interface is a key for us, allowing us to perform tasks remotely without needing to physically touch anything. Everything can be done through APIs via the iDRAC, making it a very powerful tool we rely on regularly. Its integration into other products, such as OpenManage Enterprise, drives us to use the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as a whole.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have benefited our organization greatly since we sell numerous units for our customers. We are working with HPC systems for our customers, and it really is the bread and butter product. Everything starts with compute, and that's the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for you.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are doing a pretty good job; they're moving towards liquid cooling and making it more accessible. The form factor is nice, and they're easy to work on as far as tools and everything.

The licensing of the different formats of the iDRAC is somewhat annoying; I understand why they do it, but if you have the iDRAC license, you should have access to everything. I don't understand why it needs to be sliced into levels such as essential for the bare bones; everyone's going to use Enterprise anyway, so in my opinion, we don't need that many levels of licensing for iDRAC.

I've used the solution for five years now. 

I have not experienced any performance issues with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; however, we have experienced downtime. It's usually due to environmental issues in a lab, not due to of the server itself. 

We have had crashes due to hardware failure. The causes for that have been memory DIMMs and hard drives that needed to be replaced. I should note that they've never caused any outages or crashes; they went bad and had to be replaced. Thanks to the redundancy, they didn't cause any crashes that I can think of. 

We've had operating system crashes yet not hardware-based ones. I would assess the overall stability and reliability of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as very good; it directly relates to no crashes.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale for our company absolutely, as we are a small company.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers don't necessarily cater to small businesses and small-medium businesses; it's usable yet not really catered to. It caters more to enterprises.

I have worked with customer support before. My impressions of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support specifically are that they are usually fine. I don't need to engage technical support as much as some of the other products because it's straightforward. Usually, it's break-fix type of situations, and that's always pretty easy and responsive.

Positive

I have evaluated other server solutions. We have reviewed HP, Supermicro, and Penguin Computing servers in the past. We go with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers because we are a Dell Titanium partner. We have a long-standing relationship that allows us better pricing and discounts.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are very easy to deploy; it goes right back to the iDRAC, which makes it super easy.

The iDRAC is really the only thing you license on a Dell PowerEdge Rack Server.

We are using blades, multi-use chassis, and rack servers from the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; no towers. We do use the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for AI initiatives. In terms of AI usage, we have developed our own AI, such as a large language model chatbot for internal use to import documents and perform tasks. Anything beyond that, we are unable to discuss.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the product overall a ten.

We primarily use our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for virtualization. In practical terms, they host all of our virtual machines, ranging from our Active Directory infrastructure and file servers to our various business applications.

It has significantly improved our operations. The feedback has been great, mainly because we’ve experienced very few outages—which is critical for us—and the administration is both simple and effective.

What sets Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers apart is Dell’s strong commercial approach compared to HPE; that is often the deciding factor for us. When you combine that with their solid build quality and competitive pricing, they really stand out. The management tools make our lives much easier as admins—if we had to choose again, there's simply no contest.

To suggest improvements, I would need more experience with other vendors. Aside from HPE, I lack a broad enough benchmark for a true comparison. While there is room for optimization—where PowerEdge could certainly help—it would require some development work to fully leverage the hardware.

I have been using these Dell servers for five or six years, so they are going to reach the end of the warranty soon.

I wouldn't say it's completely issue-free; maybe a few alerts a month triggered by updates, but overall, the tools offered and the whole ecosystem provided by Dell allow us to monitor all our infrastructure and alert us in case of issues.

I think it adapts to the growth of my company absolutely, as the solution we chose from Dell is a scalable offering that fully meets our needs.

Directly, I have not needed to contact customer support, but my colleague has called Dell very rarely.

Positive

Before adopting Dell, I knew HPE from my previous company, with my current company we had decided to switch to Dell with PowerEdge, and we were very happy with the choice we made, as we had no issues in terms of administration, management, and performance.

Compared to equivalent HPE solutions, the primary differentiator for our company is the more competitive pricing.

We do the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series directly with Dell, and we have a Dell engineer who comes to set up the infrastructure, we do it together, but he configures the whole system for us.

We do the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series directly with Dell, and we have a Dell engineer who comes to set up the infrastructure, we do it together, but he configures the whole system for us.

I can say that I have seen a return on my investment.

The pricing is comprehensive, covering both the hardware and the necessary licenses. Of course, I wouldn't say that all products are identical; while a server is a server at its core, the details matter.

Before adopting Dell, I knew HPE from my previous company, with my current company we had decided to switch to Dell with PowerEdge, and we were very happy with the choice we made.

I would give it a 9 out of 10. While I considered a perfect 10, I prefer to give a 9 to leave some room for improvement, as no solution is ever truly perfect. My main advice to others is to look closely at the value for the money; the combination of competitive pricing and reliability is what really stands out for us. This consistent performance is why I’ve given it such a high overall rating.

Our use cases for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involve using it as our host for our virtualized environment.

The main benefit is reliability when I think about how a server has been running quietly for four years without even a fan failure or anything like that. Nobody's touched it for half a decade, and it's still running great.

The feature I appreciate the most about Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the reliability. I have tried other manufacturers and servers both personally and in my job, and it's clear that the Dell PowerEdge offers the best price, performance, and reliability; there's really no contest.

We use a monitoring system, specifically Zabbix, to measure performance metrics with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, which alerts us to high usage and provides metrics on running out of RAM and high CPU usage.

I wish that Dell had a competitive product to the HPE MicroServer because if they did, I would buy them, not in their hundreds, but certainly in their tens, especially in my capacity as an MSP. I sell more HPE MicroServers than any other type of server, and while they're solid, I dislike the external power supplies and the previous generation with soldered and integrated CPUs. I wish there were a Dell solution for $1,000 to $1,500 for small spaces and clients that don't have dedicated server rooms.

I don't have any other points of improvement, but I have a gripe about the way Dell has broken down their storage offerings, making it quite confusing, even for us technical folks, though that falls outside of PowerEdge.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for what feels like my entire career, and it's more than a decade.

I have not seen any instability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, as they have been absolutely solid. I can only recall one hardware failure over a number of years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are as scalable as any other server, and when we talk about scalability, it essentially means right-sizing at the time of conception.

I believe Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have features that cater to the needs of SMB organizations, but I wish they had a more SME-oriented small server product that competes with the HPE MicroServer.

We contacted technical support due to a network device failure we had probably four months ago, and even though it was the small hours of the morning, the resolution was quick, and tech support was pretty great, so I have no complaints there. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used alternatives to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, including the HP Enterprise products, and have used all kinds of alternatives. The HPE ProLiant is probably the closest alternative to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, but the purchase channels and after-sales support aren't quite as easy. There are not many HPE VARs. I prefer the experience of working with Dell partners, as the whole purchasing process with Dell is less time out of my day.

The initial deployment of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is no more difficult than deploying anything else.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not require any more maintenance on my end than any other server. 

The pricing for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is on par with everything else at the moment.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not play a role in our company's AI initiatives, as anything we're doing AI-wise is all in the cloud, and we're not doing any AI on-premises at the moment. 

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten. 

Our use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that we sell to customers depending on the solution they need. For customers that want typical three-tier architecture, who don't want the FX or VXR rail, they just want to be able to get two, three, five, or ten nodes. Whatever is sold, we go out, install it, and configure it to get it ready for the customer.

I consider iDRAC to be the most valuable feature in Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, which is available everywhere in all Dell products. I prefer iDRAC compared to competitors' solutions, including HP solutions. 

A feature that would enhance Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the ability to get multiple servers up and running quickly versus having to do one at a time. Unless I use OpenManage, most customers don't want us to do that. It would be beneficial to have an easier way to get these updated quickly out of the box, even if that means having a tool that lets us run it on our laptops or that I can quickly spin up in a customer environment to push firmware for multiple nodes simultaneously.

When asked about improvements, I find it difficult to suggest changes since the system functions so effectively.

I have been working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for three years.

The organizations that install Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers generally have anywhere between 500 to 2,000 people, so it's usually smaller companies I deal with.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale with customer needs effectively. 

They're usually used for three-tier, where customers already have either substantial storage or they have other storage platforms that they're bringing in and connecting. Whenever they need to, they can just add more nodes. 

Since it doesn't have to be in a particular rack or even on the same floor in a multi-floor customer environment, they can always place it wherever needed. The ability to put a node wherever they need it is advantageous.

Customer service response for break/fix issues and support documentation for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has been good thus far. I have concerns with other products, specifically PowerFlex. That said, in general, PowerEdge support has been excellent. My experience with customer service has been positive. When we had a power supply failure out of the box, we called support, and they delivered the replacement within four hours as promised.

Positive

The deployment time for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers varies depending on the customer environment and factors such as cabling requirements and switch proximity. 

After the equipment is racked, stacked, cabled, and powered on, I can typically get ESXi up and running with vCenter and basic operational functionality for up to ten nodes in an eight-hour day.

While I'm not on the sales side and don't necessarily follow up afterwards, I observe that customers who have had Dell products previously often return to Dell for refreshes, which indicates they are seeing return on investment.

I evaluate the price-to-performance of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as good.

They are not very expensive.

The competitors I have used include Supermicro equipment, HP equipment, and some Lenovo equipment many years ago.

At this time, we're not using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for any AI-based initiatives. 

Our partnership with Dell and what we're able to provide to the customer is valuable. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine.