Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

My role in using or managing Dell PowerEdge R-Series includes installing, marketing, selling, and maintenance. My company uses Dell PowerEdge R-Series for specific use cases such as storage servers, application priority, SAP, and all others including Active Directory.

The features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that I appreciate the most include the remote maintenance, specifically iDRAC. Having this product benefits my company because there are many manufacturers, such as HP, and after experiencing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, the simplicity makes it very straightforward to manage and configure. Dell PowerEdge R-Series has supported growth and operational success because it is very reliable and a good manufacturer. Dell PowerEdge R-Series has features that specifically cater to the needs of small or medium companies.

I don't think I need to change anything about Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series from the beginning, for 25 years.

The stability and reliability of the platform are very stable and reliable; that is why I am working with them.

I basically use the SMB client, so I don't need to add features or servers to increase the ability to extend; if I need to change a server, I just replace it.

When I have a problem or question, I call customer service, and they keep checking with me until the problem is solved. I would rate the customer service and technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I was using HP as another product in the past. I changed because I had a problem with the support for HP, and everything in HP requires adding features and isn't simple; the simplicity is not comparable.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that everything is working smoothly; I don't need to return to the customer to change parts.

My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing is that, when compared to other manufacturers, the pricing is good.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not play a role in my company's AI initiatives. The R series is suitable for me, for approximately 100 clients, so it's basically the main product that I use. My advice to other companies considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that Dell is a very reliable and long-lasting company that leads the market and technology, so I recommend Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series a 10.

Our company uses Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers primarily for VMware, but we also have several PowerEdge for NAS storage.

I am a system administrator. I deploy new servers. More recently, I've been decommissioning old servers and getting those ready to refurbish because we have to resell or surplus them. I also help look up specs to recommend to my director what we should get for the next refresh.

From using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, our company has realized sustainability and reliability, as we don't have to worry about whether they will go down or not. They have been very reliable, except for one server issue, which had nothing to do with Dell or the server itself, just an act of nature.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the iDRAC, because it allows me to remotely access it from my computer without having to plug in a monitor and keyboard. I can see what's wrong and manually push updates if needed. For example, we recently had a motherboard that was bad, and iDRAC informed me of the faulty component, which is helpful because it saves me from guessing what's wrong.

A nice-to-have feature for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers would be shorter lengths because we recently got a new data center with horizontal PDUs, and we had to replace some PowerEdges due to their longer sizes, which wouldn't fit without taking out the PDUs and switching to vertical ones.

I've been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for three years now, and from what I can tell, my company has been using them for a very long time. They're great.

They are very reliable.

We are a small to medium-sized organization. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers cater to the needs of our small to medium-sized company, as we can contact our Dell rep and explain our needs, and they can recommend the perfect PowerEdge for us.

I would describe my experience with Dell's support for PowerEdge solutions as great, as we had to get a motherboard replaced, and the replacement part arrived the next business day, which was impressive. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

They tried HPE servers for a bit, but they didn't really like them.

The only challenge we faced was when they were longer servers. We couldn't fit them in our rack without taking out the PDUs.

I know the pricing for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers went up last year, and we weren't too happy about that, but it is what it is.

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

The main use cases for us are office applications, office servers, and messaging. On Dell PowerEdge R-Series for the office services, it is mainly storage.

What distinguishes Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for me compared to others is the robustness and the longevity. The features I find most useful and that I like the most are the fast server restarts. Few failures save time; we gain time. Dell PowerEdge R-Series improves my organization mainly as a time saver and in terms of reliability, so we know we have equipment that is reliable. We are not afraid to refresh the ranges by going with the same thing again, but we know we are on hardware that is reliable, so we go for it with our eyes closed.

I think the power consumption part could be improved if we want to develop the Green IT aspect.

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

We look at the server downtime rate to measure the success of Dell PowerEdge R-Series. The server downtime rate is almost zero; we have almost no failures. We also analyze CPU consumption depending on what is running, to see if we are using a lot of RAM. I have had no problems.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series adapts well to our organization's growth. We can add servers; it is scalable.

I have not used technical support at any point, but some colleagues have.

I did not consider another solution before choosing Dell.

I would describe the server deployment experience as very easy. Once it is racked and the network connections are plugged in, it starts up by itself; almost nothing needs to be done.

We can see a return on investment in general because we keep the servers for at least five years. Between five and eight years, we have a return on investment practically every time.

Dell is a long-standing partner with whom we have good relations, and we know the hardware is reliable. For the moment, for certain workloads, they are not put in competition. For others, they are. The price and the licenses work for us.

We are just starting AI initiatives in our organization now. For the moment, Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not play a role in that because we are not at the infrastructure stage. We are more in the thinking stage about what use cases we can develop, and for now, the hardware part is not taken into account. There is the possibility of going with that on Dell PowerEdge R-Series. I would rate this product a 9.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is used for edge services in our company. We are testing whether Dell PowerEdge is on par with HPE, because we have been using HPE for more than 20 years, and it has been serving us very well. However, we still have doubts about some Dell aspects, particularly support. We are using a few Dell PowerEdges in the field to test if it is working and if it is mature. If it is not mature, then we will need to switch back to HPE. We are running two servers in a Citrix platform together with eight HPE servers to see if the performance is on par, if it is working as expected, and what the administrative overhead for the system engineers is. It is another platform that works in another way, so there is a learning curve, but I wonder if the end user notices anything. From my standpoint, I also consider the financial aspect of it.

Not really have I appreciated any feature about Dell PowerEdge R-Series so far because we are running a hypervisor on it, making it just a server in a rack. However, iDRAC is nice, although HPE iLO is better.

In terms of the interface, HPE is cleaner. Dell is more like a website, requiring us to search everywhere to find a feature to turn on or off, and sometimes it is hard to know where it is set. Of course, that is based on experience, as we are experienced with HPE, but HPE's management interface and their website are cleaner than Dell's. Dell has too much bloatware, too many settings, and it varies with updates, but overall, it is okay, just another way of working.

I have realized benefits so far from running Dell PowerEdges just from a financial standpoint.

The Intel processor handles my workloads well. It is just Intel, and it just works.

Dell PowerEdge could be better by having a cleaner interface, especially for iDRAC, as well as improving the support website of Dell in general, making it easier to find firmware and drivers. This is feedback I am getting from my engineers, as they find it difficult to locate settings or download items. It needs to be easier and cleaner.

We have been using Dell PowerEdges for almost two or three years now.

So far, the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdges is good, but we are only running it for almost three years now, so I cannot tell over the long term.

The scalability question depends on the outcomes of our experiment, making it not applicable at this time.

We have utilized Dell support to help us, but of course, it takes time for them to start analyzing and determining the cause of the issue. Support is fine. We used to believe it was better, but that is what we are experimenting with. We are not only looking at cost but also support.

I cannot tell you the exact rating for their support; I would have to ask my engineers, but it would be around a six or seven.

What is lacking for me to make it a ten in terms of support is having a clear support system. Reachability should be better, with native-speaking Dutch engineers available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week instead of being transferred to India, for example.

Neutral

Of course, I considered HP ProLiant before deciding on Dell PowerEdge.

We are only running HPE, specifically HPE Incorporated and HPE Enterprise, not Lenovo.

It is difficult because it is new and looks different from what we are used to. That is the problem. When something is not working as expected, finding documentation becomes an issue. Where it would take an hour to set up an HPE server, for example, it took almost two working days for the first Dell PowerEdge to get it running.

I have not deployed Dell PowerEdges myself, but for my engineers, it is difficult.

The ROI from purchasing Dell PowerEdges versus HP or any other vendors is close, although it really depends on what the account manager is doing and whether they want an extra customer or not.

The pricing was nice, otherwise it would not be Dell, so I am only looking at pricing.

It is a little bit cheaper than HP, although that depends on the sales process. Sometimes HPE wants to do more than Dell, which makes it interesting from a financial perspective. From an operational perspective, it is just equipment.

Not specifically do I think Dell PowerEdge has features that cater to the needs of my company. It is just another hardware vendor. I see it with more transparency because you can have IBM, Lenovo, or HPE, but they all include an Intel chip, and they all include chips from NVIDIA. For me, it is just equipment, and whether it is Lenovo, Dell, or HPE does not matter much. The support behind the equipment is more important, and financially it is just comparing HPE versus Dell versus Lenovo.

I do not know at this time what model or functionality of servers or rack servers are being used.

I think it is the R model, specifically R660 or something similar, and I think they were invested last year.

I do not have any other differentiators to mention about the benefits of HP versus Dell solutions, as we are only running Dell PowerEdge and ProLiant.

My overall review rating for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is eight out of ten.

Our use case mainly involves running our exchange server 2019 on the SimpliVity, along with other healthcare-related servers that are also on HP, including the domain controller. We are moving away from HP because of their support issues and solutions.

The most valuable function we found in Hyper-Converged is the application version we are currently using, which is HP SimpliVity version 4.1.0.266, although we are not fully satisfied with it. We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers without issues. We occasionally replace one or two servers, but the majority are still functioning well. We've relied on Dell's EqualLogic storage for over ten years, receiving many alerts but overall having a perfectly functioning setup in the back end.

Dell's support is an area that needs improvement as their product reliability is good, but the support is not as strong as HP's. I suggest that Dell should include a built-in backup solution in VxRail, similar to what we find in Sangfor, where the backup feature is integrated.

We have been working with HP Hyper-Converged for around five years.

We have never faced unplanned downtime with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers.

After HP SimpliVity, the hyper-converged solution, we are not using any more HP servers. We are working with Nutanix and Sangfor, and previously we also worked with Dell. Initially, these servers were with Dell, but we moved them to HP SimpliVity after the hardware expired. Our reason for this shift was based on a technical and financial comparison, as we got a better price from HP.

Dell's pricing has been high for us, which led us to move to SimpliVity.

We are still working with Nutanix products, and we also moved to another vendor called Sangfor. We are using HP SimpliVity as our hyper-converged solution, but we are not satisfied with their services and support. We have 24 nodes of HP SimpliVity, and this year we decide not to renew the contract as we plan for one more solution which could be Nutanix to replace the SimpliVity.

We use Dell's EqualLogic storage technology and Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers R740, R730, R740, and R750 servers. We are also using some applications and one or two servers from HP for Cisco operations. We have been working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for maybe ten years. We use Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for our healthcare applications and for running an old version of the exchange server.

The main benefits we receive from Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are stability and reliability. While we occasionally receive complaints about hard disk failures, overall, we find the solution satisfactory. We could not continue with Dell due to high pricing, but we have transitioned to HP and are now moving to Sangfor and Nutanix.

Flexibility-wise, both Dell and HP solutions are okay for us, as we run VMware on Dell hardware, managing around 120 to 130 virtual machines. In the past, we primarily used Dell while paying to Dell and VMware, but given the changes in VMware's pricing after Broadcom's acquisition, we are now transitioning to HCI solutions that provide similar features.

We cannot give a proper estimation of power consumption due to high cooling and availability in our data center, but our HCI solutions consume less electricity now compared to older Dell servers, which had high energy consumption. We are not familiar with AI workloads, as no one has presented this feature to us. We purchased the product from a third-party business partner.

When comparing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with HP SimpliVity, we see that they serve different purposes; Dell operates standalone on VMware, whereas HP is a hyper-converged solution. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers stands out as a better option in this context. Overall, we give Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a final rating of six out of ten.

My primary use cases for Dell PowerEdge R-Series in my company mostly focus on production use, for all the servers and systems inside the company environment. I prefer not to go into details, but we have Active Directory concepts, databases, SQL, and similar systems running on them.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does not yet play a role in my company's AI initiatives.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series supports the growth and operational success of my company in an amazing way. We had several meetings with Dell PowerEdge R-Series representatives who came to our office, understood our forecast, and managed to help us build infrastructure that would support our goal.

Since then, we have definitely scaled up as we purchased several more servers.

I need to think about in what areas Dell PowerEdge R-Series could be better and what additional features I would want to see included in the next releases.

I have no suggestions about room for improvement regarding Dell PowerEdge R-Series. Everything is fine with Dell PowerEdge R-Series; we enjoy it. It's a server, and I don't have any current pain points or features that I would want to see. We simply enjoy it.

I have almost 20 years of experience working in my current field. I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for almost all my professional years.

I can say that Dell PowerEdge R-Series is a reliable and stable solution for me, and if any issues arise, they know how to solve them.

We have definitely scaled up as we purchased several more servers since our initial deployment.

On a scale of one to 10, I would give their support a rating of 10. I don't remember a situation where I was furious as I've been with other vendors, so they are better than others.

Positive

I have evaluated other vendors before choosing Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but I started as a junior with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, and as a senior, I continue doing good. Dell PowerEdge R-Series has proven itself as a reliable solution, and the service is great; you don't want to take a risk with something else.

The setup cost for Dell PowerEdge R-Series was fair enough.

I have definitely realized a return on my investment in Dell PowerEdge R-Series, as even old machines are still working as robust systems. We can use them in the DR or at least in the laboratory environment as a second generation.

I am the IT Manager managing Dell PowerEdge R-Series. With VMware and Veeam, they worked perfectly and smoothly for backups. When we had accidents and situations that required restoration, it worked perfectly and the service was fine.

As I'm in a security company and most of the systems are on-prem, we're trying to migrate most of the systems to something that will collaborate between systems, and the next step we will start to implement AI. I want AI to help with basic tasks, including helping developers, procurement, inventory, and regular day-to-day operations.

The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerEdge R-Series include the service as one of the first things, the salesperson, and all the surrounding aspects. The server itself is similar to HP and other vendors, but when you have a problem and the service is better than fine, this is a win-win situation.

My advice to someone evaluating Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that cost is not always the most important factor; sometimes you need to consider other benefits when buying a product. We can speak with potential customers if Dell PowerEdge R-Series wants our recommendation. Dell can be in touch with me if they have any questions.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series solutions between 9 and 10.

We choose Dell PowerEdge R-Series to perform backup and to store multiple data for our team in our businesses. We do not do much with it. We mainly use external management for our business applications rather than internal management. For Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we primarily use it for backup and for network shares for the different people and staff.

The most valuable feature of having Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the iDRAC, and the ease of administration is nice too; they are quite easily manageable.

The biggest benefit my company gets from having Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that they work as we expect and deliver the performance that we expect. We mainly look at what is in the hardware when we buy servers; that is what interests us. If we buy servers from Dell, it is because they meet our expectations.

There is a little margin for improvement. I would appreciate more facility to open the server and remove the pieces, such as the CPU, hard drive, and RAM but overall, the product is good to me.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for three years, my company has been using it for around 10 years.

My impressions of the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series are good, as we still have some servers from Dell that we use for secondary purposes that are more than 20 years old.

Even though there is some downtime, they are durable. We had to tinker with them a little, change some parts, and repair them.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series does expand with my company's needs in a way, but we are not too dependent on it. Everything that is important for our company is hosted externally; we just have everything for network sharing of documents locally that staff need on the spot. We do not have large needs on the local server that we store at our place.

I have not used Dell's customer support service; I do everything myself.

Neutral

I have previously used other solutions, including HP and other brands of servers, but not many.

The best part about using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for a small company like mine is the simplicity of setup; it is simple to set up and fast, with no particular problems during setup, unlike certain other types of servers from other brands.

Comparing Dell PowerEdge R-Series to HP, HP is already much more complicated, notably on the part of their equivalent of iDRAC, which is much more obscure and less intuitive to understand.

While we have not yet deployed AI initiatives on our Dell PowerEdge R-Series infrastructure, these projects are firmly on our future roadmap. We are currently in the early discussion and planning stages, and we expect to evaluate our hardware requirements more concretely as these projects progress.

I have no specific criticisms regarding the product. When compared to competitors, I highly recommend the PowerEdge R-Series for its streamlined setup and deployment. While I don't claim it is the only solution on the market, its simplicity and reliability are perfectly suited to our current environment. I rate the solution an 8 out of 10; it is a consistently strong performer, though there is always room for minor iterative improvements.

We are using these servers for our production. We are basically a distance learning university where we have a learning management system, websites, online exams, and a campus management system. All these portals are running on these clusters.

We didn't face many hardware failures. Hardware is very reliable. The performance has been good, with only one or two pieces of equipment failing during the period from 2018 to 2025. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers helped reduce unplanned production downtime significantly. We have deployed our clusters. In the case of any failure, our virtual machines migrate automatically. We didn't face any major disaster during this period. We faced downtime twice in five to six years, but it was because our cluster was under capacity. We had deployed many VMs on the cluster.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are good in terms of energy consumption.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are reliable with good hardware quality. During our 5 to 6 years of deployment, we experienced minimal hardware failures. 

In Pakistan, the vendors or the partners of Dell are not providing a good environment. They need to improve their support and hire partners that have certified support sources. Currently, we are not getting good deployment experience. However, after deployment, Dell solutions perform very well.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since 2018. We deployed the cluster of Dell and VMware in 2018, but we are going to replace this equipment with HPE and VMware.

We're using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers R730. For the backup appliance, we're using Quest. We have also used R410 servers which were replaced with R730 in 2018.

They are very reliable. One or two modules being faulty in five to six years is negligible. The warranty of that equipment expired in 2023, but we are still using it, and we are comfortable with it. The cluster is performing well.

It is scalable as we can add nodes and hard drives to increase space.

Currently, the Dell and VMware solution is in our production, and we are going to replace it with HPE. HPE is a competitor and will hopefully provide us a comfort level.

The deployment of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers was easy.

We are just running a VMware cluster. There is no cloud environment. We are going to deploy a full vCloud foundation environment in our data center on HPE equipment.

I have also received a demo on VxRail, which is an excellent product of Dell. When we deploy VMware on VxRail, those two products are really excellent, and I hope HPE will provide us with the same environment.

These deployments are provided by local partners.

They are affordable. Even during our recent procurement, the cost of Dell servers was lower than that of HPE. However, there were some certificates and vendor issues. We have a partner in Pakistan. The partner didn't have the certifications to meet our requirements. That's why they are out of this tender. Otherwise, the price quoted by Dell was lower than the price quoted by HPE.

It deserves a rating of ten out of ten. It's an excellent product. We are hoping to get a similar experience from our HPE servers.