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Cisco Nexus 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
7.5
Cisco Nexus offers high ROI with stability, efficiency, and reliability, justifying higher costs with long-term productivity gains.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer reliability, cost efficiency, excellent performance, and long-term financial benefits with effective workload handling.
Speeding up our response times and reducing errors and incidents with automation and available APIs.
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
7.2
Cisco Nexus technical support is efficient and knowledgeable, with mixed experiences but generally positive feedback on reliability and global reach.
Sentiment score
7.5
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers' support is praised for responsiveness, efficiency, but occasionally faces communication delays, offering premium options.
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
7.8
Cisco Nexus is highly scalable and adaptable, offering seamless expansion and integration despite cost concerns.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers provide scalable solutions for various business sizes, enabling flexible and predictable growth despite some limitations.
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
8.0
Cisco Nexus is highly reliable and stable, with minor bugs occasionally reported, maintaining a strong reputation for uptime.
Sentiment score
8.3
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are celebrated for their stability, reliability, and ability to support critical applications without major disruptions.
Initially, the stability of Cisco Nexus, particularly with the ACI, was problematic due to unstable codes, requiring replacements.
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

Cisco Nexus needs enhancements in UI, integration, virtualization, automation, multi-tenancy, pricing, OS intuitiveness, stability, scalability, and AI integration.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers need improved memory, management, and support to address concerns about performance, security, and efficiency.
When I talk about data centers, which are critical infrastructure and centralized application hubs, the Nexus platforms should be highly stable.
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

Cisco Nexus is costly with complex licensing but valued for its premium features and long-term enterprise benefits.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer competitive pricing with flexible options and fair value, aligning well with industry standards.
The price of Cisco Nexus is on the higher side due to the premium services Cisco offers.
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

Cisco Nexus provides high performance and flexibility with features enhancing network efficiency, making it ideal for large-scale networks.
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer scalability, reliability, and ease of use, excelling in performance, security, and management for diverse organizations.
The VPC feature of Cisco Nexus is great because it provides an active-active way of forwarding the traffic and avoids blocking any of the links.
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

Cisco Nexus
Ranking in Data Center Networking
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
LAN Switching (3rd)
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 Cisco Nexus is 19.4%, up from 15.4% 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

Joe Benítez - PeerSpot reviewer
Offer high performance capabilities and enables efficient data transmission and processing
Before Nexus, I used to have Catalyst 6500 switches. Those 6500 series chassis gave us a lot of problems. Too many problems, actually. And we had a Cisco ASA firewall blade within those chassis. And they were running outdated software. So, in fact, it was the firewall blade that caused us too many problems instead of the chassis. The chassis itself was working well and performing fine, but the firewall card was not suitable for our needs. That was one aspect. Additionally, those chassis had been in operation for more than five years. As we are a local government, we have a policy to renew hardware every five years. That's because we need to maintain all the hardware and software in the latest versions and keep up with the technology lifecycle of the technology we use.
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
24%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
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 Cisco Nexus?
The product's initial setup phase is very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Nexus?
The price of Cisco Nexus is on the higher side due to the premium services Cisco offers. Despite the cost, it offers valuable features and services.
What needs improvement with Cisco Nexus?
When I talk about data centers, which are critical infrastructure and centralized application hubs, the Nexus platforms should be highly stable. Initially, the codes I received through ACI were qui...
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

No data available
PowerEdge R
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Banco de Guayaquil, Baylor Scott & White Health, BH Telecom, Bowling Green State University, Calligaris, Children's Hospital Colorado, City of Biel, Del Papa Distributing, Department of Justice, Dimension Data, Dualtec Cloud Builders, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), Hertz, K&L Gates , LightEdge, Lone Star College System, Management Science Associates, Mindtree, NBC Olympics, Quest, Sony Corporation, The Department of Education in Western Australia, Valley Proteins
NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Nexus vs. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.