Dell PowerEdge vs. HPE ProLiant DL

PowerEdge C Series is very reliable equipment from a reference manufacturer in the market with a lot of experience and one of the best warranty and technical support services. Dell hardware provides us with resource savings, energy savings of up to 40%, scalability, physical space optimization, and performance and reliability to handle sensitive and critical data such as databases and ERP systems that are quite complex.

Incentivized

It is a robust and reliable machine and can be used in different scenarios. If you have a requirement for a high end physical server to host your organizations different online services then you can use ProLiant DL. It can also be used in an environment where there is a need to host multiple different virtual machines on two or more physical servers.

Incentivized

• Good price - Compared to other vendors’ server platforms. In our scenario (virtualization) we found out PowerEdge offers the best price/vCPU and RAM ratio.
• Customizable - We were able to select optimal memory/disk capacity for our use case. Other platform's minimum requirements were above our needs, hence needlessly expensive.
• Good warranty and service - Our project did not involve creating a big cluster with a lot of spare capacity, so the next business day warranty came handy.

Incentivized

• Remote management is excellent. The newest iLO software is really good and has more than enough options to satisfy most datacenter needs.
• Uptime! These machines just keep trucking and don't need much care and feeding, even with mechanical drives where they're used.
• Centralized management is a breeze.
• Provisioning has been good for some time and has gotten even better recently.
• Security is good and very rarely are the units in need of an urgent security update.

Incentivized

• Getting DSAT report remotely does becomes a challenge sometimes
• Server rebooting becomes an issue, it does not starts up easily
• Server heats up sometimes a lot, emitting lot of noice

• With upgrades to newer versions of VMware, HP has not provided VMware images with loaded drivers, this could be an issue for future upgrades to VMware users on HPs. The support forums discuss this and we wonder why no images are available.
• Lilo support can be limited. These servers were preconfigured for us. HP was not able to help with this, telling us it must be in the preconfigured setup.
• The base server did not meet our needs and the price ramped up quickly with add-ons to utilize SAN.

Incentivized

It is the best server in the market.

The Dell PowerEdge R range is just intuitive when you have skills engineers managing them in-house, although even with new members of staff on the team, the learning curve is very low providing they have previous general service hardware management experience. From the specification through to the management of this range, the usability is excellent.

Usability is generally good. I mostly like to use the management interface on HPE servers. GUI is well placed and provides easy access to management and reporting. Firmware upgrade is usually smooth, drivers install correctly and provide good quality of service. We have enough ports and interfaces to connect to the servers and some room to upgrade.

Incentivized

We consider Dell's support to be best-in-class compared to other solutions and is also reasonably priced. Their SLA targets have almost always been met, except for minor occasions that have had extenuating circumstances. The service staff is also professional and thorough. Overall, we are very satisfied with the level of support we receive.

Incentivized

In over a decade, not once had we had a bad call with HPE support, not only were they have extremely qualified engineers but the speed in answering and addressing users is bar none. The same can not be said about support from other competitors in our experience over the years.

Incentivized

Installation was easy.

When it comes to multitasking networking and storage, I've always found Dell PowerEdge C to be the most effective solution. A network center that can service the whole business with capacity for future expansion is ideally suited for this device. The ability to consolidate data into a single storage system has reduced workloads. Using this platform is simple and the customer support team is constantly available.

I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.

Incentivized

• From the perspective of physical server consolidations, when servers spread across multiple branch and remote offices are gathered into a central data center, this simplification process provides ROI in several ways. One, the configuration control, restriction of server access.
• Reduce complexity and enable greater standardization of hardware purchases, which lowers costs.
• Increased security of the move are important.
• The costs of moves, add-ins, and changes are reduced, as well as the costs of travel time and maintenance.
• Migrating legacy operating systems to a newer version via rehosting brings similar ROI benefits when it comes to server consolidation.

Incentivized

• They last forever. We only replace them when newer versions of VMWare don't support our oldest models. Our refresh cycle on virtual hosts is 6 or 7 years.
• Plenty of third-party service support available when the warranty is up. This helps extend the life cycle as well.

Incentivized