Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers Reviews

We are a Dell partner, and we're kind of like a hybrid type of partner that sells new products and also maintains a large stock of inventory. We build servers, storage, and solutions for clients and data centers. In terms of a specific use case, we build a lot of VMware vSAN in this solution. 

Their management tools are the most valuable. Our customers like the flexibility of being able to scale up and out. It is very easy for them to scale and add additional nodes and servers to their storage solutions, such as the ATI solution.

It has very good quality and a great deployment model. Its warranty is also very good, and it is very stable. Their fixes have been quick if they have those.

After purchasing the product, customers have not been getting the support that they need in the early stages of getting set up. They can provide customers a little bit more education as to what they get with certain warranty levels. The data is there if the customers dig, but a lot of times, the customers don't dig. 

Some of the other server models come out a little bit quicker than Dell. It would be good if Dell is quicker to market on new, larger drives when they become available. Sometimes, we do get hit on that against a couple of competitors. Dell vets them a little bit longer than like the super micros to keep their stability and quality level up, but they lose a little bit of ground to a super micro. It would be good if they can release features and models as soon and as fast as they can. It would help them to stay more competitive.

We've been selling these servers for 19 years.

These units are very robust. They're rock solid.

There is absolutely no problem with scalability. These machines are built to be able to scale up.

They've been dynamite. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

It has a great deployment model.

I would advise to just do your homework and make sure that you get the warranty and support levels that you're going to need. Understand what you will get and whether you need software support along with it. 

We do a cost analysis for our clients based upon the total cost of ownership. We do that for every deal. That's a very smart process to follow for any tech solution because some people think that if they just put a solution, it will solve all of their problems, which is not necessarily the case.

I would rate PowerEdge Rack Servers a ten out of ten. We love these servers. These are quality products, and I would personally purchase them for my own business. 

We are a reseller. Our customers use this solution for governing the system and for some specific applications. They are going towards the hyper-convergence infrastructure or HCI in Egypt. Our customers have on-premises and cloud deployments.

It is user friendly and easy to configure.

System security can be improved. They can add more power and security for ESXi version 7.

My company has been using the Dell PowerEdge servers for about ten years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It can be scaled with storage, such as with EMC storage. Our plans are for three years. If a customer needs the solution, we proceed to secure a deal and plan for three years so that the customer doesn't suffer because of scalability issues. Our customers are government departments as well as private businesses.

They are good. The visibility of Dell is very strong in Egypt, especially in the north where most of the engineers are. We also have a distributor. They're very supportive and help us in training and sizing.

It is easy to set up because the Lifecycle Controller is very friendly, especially when you use the GUI for initialization. The system and the RAID controller take time, but in general, it is very easy to set up. You can check the Lifecycle.

We do it ourselves because we are a reseller, and we have a technical team to deploy it.

The server is a one-time purchase, but the support is on a subscription basis.

Dell has a new product every quarter, so its portfolio is very large. 

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers a ten out of ten.

Currently, I work for a company partnered with Dell EMC; I used to work for another company, also partnered with Dell EMC.

I would like to see a virtual view of the solution after creating and configuring it.

I have been using this solution for almost five years.

Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers are both scalable and stable.

I have never contacted technical support before.

The initial setup is very good, not complex at all.

The price of this solution is reasonable. It's very comparable to similar solutions. 

It's virtually the same product as UCS MSP. I don't see many differences between them.

The pre-sales HP team in Egypt is more helpful than EMC's team. Overall, I think HP is more flexible than EMC. 

I don't really have any advice to give: it's only applications installed on a server, that's it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

We use the Dell EMC R730 Rack Server. We use it for virtualization and we have some servers and some desktop virtual machines running on it. We mostly use it for testing purposes. We also use the Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Server to do QA testing for those applications. We create temporary virtual machines for this.

Virtualization is one of our main use cases. Hosting web applications is another. We also use the Dell server for standard architecture like Microsoft Excel and Office applications,

We use Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 as a server for testing our software products. We had not benchmarked anything before we purchased this, but we went through the specs during that time and did some configuration. We purchased Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 with 256GB RAM and built-in dual CPUs. We just sought this configuration from the local Dell EMC account via our account manager.

Since we use this for testing our products, we do not use it for any business process requirements. We are not hosting on it, we are just using it for testing purposes. 

We were not able to scale up the server to the number of reels that we were looking for, so our plan got stalled there. Now we are once again revisiting our plan for that after two years.

There are better processors available with multiple cores than the Dell EMC PowerEdge. Our current requirement is that we should be able to generate a load of five hundred or one thousand Windows 10 desktop VMs on a single server. We prefer to use an optimal sizing on the RAM, the storage disc, and the CPUs. That's our current requirement. Virtualization is the biggest benefit for our organization. 

We are able to virtualize a lot of applications and user desktops with the Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Server.

The main criteria I look for in all vendors are:

1. On-site service for the hardware. 
2. The warranty period, i.e. how long the warranty is. 
3. The ability of the product itself, i.e. the specs and the lifecycle of the product.
4. The hardware should be cutting edge.

I would like to see the lifecycle at seven to ten years. I want to work on the latest CPUs as much as possible, i.e. maintaining cutting edge standards, but still optimally priced.

We needed a benchmarking HP server, but since we are a small company, we went to hardware resellers. Dell EMC had some programs for SMBs and we were able to have direct interaction with them in India. We were able to get a very reasonable price for the same product which otherwise through the reseller network was extremely costly.

We found that arrangement from Dell EMC to be slightly better than compared to other vendors and why we did not choose them.

I would like to see better IOPS, i.e. the disc speed. That is the main limitation for scaling up the number of users.

Nowadays, there are web servers that have greater endurance in the lifecycle than the Dell EMC PowerEdge, so that's what I would like to see improved most.

If Dell EMC can provide us with more IOPS, a higher disc size using the SSDs, and better battery endurance in terms of the lifecycle, i.e. three to seven years, I would be satisfied. With the Dell EMC PowerEdge Server, there is a limitation on the hardware life cycles.

Another place Dell EMC could improve is with GPUs. If we can get more benchmarking done, some optimization, and more scalability for certain apps, it would be better. 

Dell EMC could improve the sizing and scaling performance that we can get with the server, including some better optimization that we can scale up. Another need for improvement is to consider the implementation of other forms of desktop virtualization.

It is quite stable. We didn't have a single downtime of failure. Nor have we ever experienced any downtime in electrical components or the hardware. In this way, the server is reliable.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Server did not scale to our expectations.

I do not recall if we needed to use Dell EMC technical support often. We did when we wanted to expand the memory and it was satisfactory.

We were already familiar with the hardware so it was straightforward to set up the web server for our requirements.

I would rate the Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten. It was satisfactory, but we were not able to scale it to the level that we expected.

Maybe we should have contacted their support or put in greater effort to find out about sizing guidelines, or maybe there is a limitation regarding the kind of scale that we are looking for.

I would advise someone considering this solution to search for the use case that is the closest match to your business. We should have referred to that before making a purchase.

We use the server as a database server. We use it to import Microsoft SQL 2014 and some IIS application servers.

I like the Dell EMC management. We have a great management interface. They are very reliable and we can trust the server. It's very reliable and easy to manage.

They should improve the centralized management interface. When you are going to deploy something, for example, VMware or RedHat, it should be easier to deploy a lot of servers. Now you have to do one at a time.

The way that they condense the information on the Dell EMC website is not so good. They should improve the website. When you need to find a download or documentation it's very hard. The information on the website is very distributed. It's hard to find the information we need.

Stability is quite good, I haven't had any problems so far.

Scalability is good. 

Technical support is great. I keep hearing reviews that it's very good. When you're opening a request or a ticket they respond very quickly. 

When the new technology doesn't run in your environment it's time to plan and make a change. That's why we're trying to change the technology with the servers. Now, people are talking about different softwares and containment technology but our environment has not adapted for these kinds of technology.

The most important criteria that we consider when looking at a solution is the reliability. We look at  the feedback from the community about the product. I always try to seek information in forums just like this one. We also look at accredited reports about the products and the vendors. I always try to find a good report about the new features and product. Lastly, we also consider whether the solution is budget friendly. 

We also looked at HP, IBM, and Huawei. We chose Dell EMC because HP wanted to charge us for the iLO management and with Dell EMC we don't have to pay for management like the iLO.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten because the product is quite reliable, quite good. We haven't had many problems with. I did not give a ten because of the website. The information isn't so well organized on the website.

They have different types of licensing of management so make sure to check their licensing because they can differentiate.

Compared to the older versions, and those from other vendors, like HPE servers and some other brands, this one has really saved us a lot of headaches when it comes to hardware replacements. It's something it seems that Dell has improved. You quickly log your support case and get support. The turnaround time is really fast.

Also, compared to the other vendors and generations, this one tends to be more user-friendly, so you spend less time trying to get where you want to go.

The server itself has the most stable updates. The patches and the updates will take you a long way before they release another one, so you aren't constantly doing more updates and upgrades. 

• Its ease of use. The GUI is accessible and everything is pretty much upfront. You don't get lost in navigating between the tabs.
• I also like a feature they call iDRAC. It's a feature that allows you remotely power on and off the server. 
• It's got a power plug.
• It's also almost a tool-less type of server, in the sense that when you want to open it up and change a few components inside, you can do so without a screwdriver or any aid of another tool.
• It also has a nice front panel, it looks nice in front.

Of course, the new generation of servers, I've yet to really use them, the 13th and the 14th generations of the Dell rack servers. I haven't gotten my hands on those yet. But as for the versions that I work with, they used to max out on memory, on RAM, quickly, so I'd want to think in the newer versions, they actually allocate more  processing power and more RAM to them. I'd want to think that's what they did with the newer versions.

It's a very stable product. From a software and hardware perspective, it's actually a bit more stable compared to other versions and vendors. It's definitely quite resilient, we haven't had many failures, hardware or software failures.

It is quite scalable. The other versions come with a lot of allocation or provision for you to scale more, so it is a scalable solution.

We switched because of the kind of support we'd get from the vendor itself, a quick response time. That's a very critical issue; how swiftly can they resolve an issue. That is one of the major reasons for the switch. The other reason was the resiliency of the products, which is one of the benefits we enjoy with the current choice that we made.

The initial setup is quite easy. The Dell OpenManage interface is straightforward, Obviously you have to read through the documentation a bit before you set it up, but it is quite straightforward.

It took us, I would say, a day for each site, because we set it up at three different sites and they're each about 80 kilometers apart. Each site took a day because we had to rearrange our server room, how the cooling would be done, and the power and things like that. Obviously, there were other things contributing to the setup of the server, not the server itself.

Yes, we did also consider other options but we took this option over the other ones because of the response time, support, and we feel that these guys were a leap ahead in terms of the technology itself.

I would tell colleagues to go for it. It's a great product, and as long as they can just stay on the latest and greatest versions, they shouldn't have any issues.

I would give it an eight out of 10. And the chief reasons are its simplicity and ease of use. 

The two points I held back I wouldn't necessarily blame on the product, I would blame it on the area, the part of the world that we are in. I think it tends to take a bit long, like one to two weeks, to replace a spare part. Sometimes it can take long because of the customs issues. Really it has nothing to do with the product itself but with area that I'm in. So someone who's in Europe will likely get better service because they are closer to the manufacturing plants and they can get the equipment in, whereas where we're from, the shipment of that stuff would have to hop notable distances. So if they could have a hub that's more central and closer to where we are, then maybe it would be a perfect 10.  

Ease of use.

Our requirement is 99.9999% uptime. That is what we have experienced from these servers.

With the technology advancements, both the OEMs improve their products for best performance. I would also prefer additional improvements in the thermal design and the management of servers.

I have used Dell servers for nine years.

No issues.

No issues.

The technical support is the best.

We have used SGI, Sun, IBM, and now Fujitsu. The procurement is through open or limited tender only.

The initial setup is mixed between being straightforward and complex.

We have well-defined process for the technical evaluation of pricing.

We evaluate all the responses to our requirements. After the selection is made for two to three products, then commercials are checked and the best price solution is selected.

Check the literature and reviews available for the product. Ask and clarify all the queries before freezing on the requirements.

The convenience, because we can swap very easily swap hard drives when one goes down.

I can't think of anything right now. It's not the perfect solution but it is reasonable.

In the past it has been very stable, but not recently.

I don't have experience with its scalability.

We have used it in the past. When we had problems, we had to contact or put a ticket with them, they would get back to us, they were very reasonable.

Before we had HPE, now we use Dell. We went with Dell because the school has a contract with them.

It was straightforward.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor are, really, everything. Number one though is customer support.

I think their price is reasonable.