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Arista Networks Platform vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Arista Networks Platform delivers good ROI, justifies higher costs with long-term savings, especially compared to Cisco and Juniper.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer reliability, cost efficiency, excellent performance, and long-term financial benefits with effective workload handling.
It is hard to measure the total cost of ownership because we have a distributed environment.
ROI is there, but it's a complex assessment when considering the return on investment from the hardware.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Arista Networks Platform offers fast, proficient support, praised for direct engineer access and high customer satisfaction globally.
Sentiment score
7.5
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers' support is praised for responsiveness, efficiency, but occasionally faces communication delays, offering premium options.
They provide instant support and maintain commitments regarding replacement products.
According to my team’s feedback, we receive extended support from the Arista team.
Dell’s technical support is rated between eight and nine.
Customer service provides very good support, with an SLA of about one business day to respond to our tickets.
When we do use Dell's support, they have never ignored an issue.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Arista Networks Platform offers scalable, reliable networking for data centers, praised for network capacity, low latency, and intuitive management.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers provide scalable solutions for various business sizes, enabling flexible and predictable growth despite some limitations.
Scalability is a key feature of Arista, owing to the possibilities to manage the entire data center network from a single console.
The scalability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is excellent.
We can add new servers at any time, so the scale-out option is there.
Customers looking for higher densities are starting to lean towards AMD to achieve more cores, higher density, lower wattage, and ultimately a smaller footprint with fewer servers.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Arista Networks Platform is highly stable with minimal downtime, praised for reliability when following best practice configurations.
Sentiment score
8.3
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are celebrated for their stability, reliability, and ability to support critical applications without major disruptions.
Over four years, we've had less than 1 percent downtime.
There is a feature to update the server while it is running, so there is no need to restart.
It is stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Arista Networks needs better documentation, integration, pricing, security, stability, management, community support, and network feature expansion.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers need improved memory, management, and support to address concerns about performance, security, and efficiency.
Feature-wise, it addresses most customer requirements.
Arista Networks is currently less popular as they were initially more focused on data centers than campus networks.
We need to know about any upcoming updates so that we can plan accordingly.
PowerEdge could have more configuration options, such as the ability to combine different CPUs, memory volumes, data storage, and memory.
After the expiration of support, it is sometimes challenging to find parts like hard drives, especially for obsolete models.
 

Setup Cost

Arista Networks is costly, with high hardware and licensing expenses, especially compared to Huawei and NETGEAR, affecting affordability.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer competitive pricing with flexible options and fair value, aligning well with industry standards.
Compared to Cisco, Arista routers are significantly cheaper.
Arista products are perceived as costly, especially compared to competitors like Cisco.
They have been stable and running for years without performance downtime or significant disc failures.
Some customers find it cheaper due to contractual agreements, while others find it expensive, especially when scaling up.
The software associated with servers, like VMware subscription licenses, drives costs.
 

Valuable Features

Arista Networks Platform is praised for its reliability, scalability, Linux shell, efficient management, automation, and unmatched monitoring capabilities.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer scalability, reliability, and ease of use, excelling in performance, security, and management for diverse organizations.
Features include plug-and-play auto-discovery, allowing centralized configuration and management.
The most valuable features of Arista include low latency, scalability, and sustainability of the products.
They keep running for at least five to seven years without any issues.
With PowerEdge Servers, I don't need a one-to-one ratio redundancy, which leads to about eighty percent downtime reduction.
One of the valuable features is Active Directory, which helps in managing the network.
 

Categories and Ranking

Arista Networks Platform
Ranking in Data Center Networking
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Ethernet Switches (10th)
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers
Ranking in Data Center Networking
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
171
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (3rd), Blade Servers (5th), Rack Servers (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Center Networking category, the mindshare of Arista Networks Platform is 15.5%, down from 23.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is 0.2%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Center Networking
 

Featured Reviews

MarekSzafrański - PeerSpot reviewer
Affordable for enterprise-sized companies
Speaking about whether the product enhanced our company's data center scalability, I would say that it was a solution that was used in a banking company, where it served as a replacement for Cisco. Though Arista Networks Platform is similar to Cisco IOS CLI, I feel that the former product offers better prices compared to the latter tool. Arista Networks Platform office is more efficient at a lower cost. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. The tool is stable and cheaper than Cisco. I would say that Arista Networks Platform is 100 percent compatible with the existing infrastructure in my company. The impact of the tool's network telemetry on our company's troubleshooting practices was just good for the scope for which I need the product. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.
Syed Masuood - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles workloads and diverse applications efficiently
We have a lot of VMs on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. On a single server, we have probably hosted 14 or 15 VMs. Out of these, 8 to 10 are continuously running, and four of them are backup VMs, so it can handle a good workload. For cybersecurity, it is only accessible on the intranet; it is not accessible through the web. We use it for local development purposes, and it is behind our firewall. Its security is strong. We handle a lot of test data for government and confidential customers. It is safe and strong locally. We have not experienced any security issues. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime if we need to replace a hard disk, instead of completely shutting a server, there is a hot swap feature. It is quite good in that aspect. Usually, for any activity, there is a downtime of about 30 minutes. It has saved a lot of time. We have tried AI workloads for a development environment for a government customer in Singapore. The servers are hosted in Singapore. It is an ML-based engine with AI. It is a government project where data is processed, and we run it on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The benefit of running AI workloads on PowerEdge Servers is that it is easy to allocate memory. The application we are running is memory intensive. It is pretty easy to scale memory and storage.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Arista Networks Platform?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arista Networks Platform?
Arista products are perceived as costly, especially compared to competitors like Cisco.
What needs improvement with Arista Networks Platform?
Currently, Arista is too costly for its customers. Feature-wise, it addresses most customer requirements. However, we sometimes face challenges when integrating with proprietary protocols and solut...
When shopping for a rack server, would you go with Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem rack servers were the better fit for us. We ultimately decided to go with Dell EMC Poweredge....
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?
It has helped us reduce unplanned downtime by 20% to 30%.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?
The price of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is competitive. There's always room for support improvements, and the AI features could continue to be enhanced as the relationship with Nvidia grows.
 

Also Known As

7000 Series
PowerEdge R
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Internet Services
NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
Find out what your peers are saying about Arista Networks Platform vs. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.