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Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs HPE Synergy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers
Ranking in Blade Servers
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
166
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (3rd), Data Center Networking (4th), Rack Servers (1st)
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is 0.8%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Synergy is 21.8%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

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.
CarlosArdila - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps grow horizontally or vertically within one box or chassis
The initial setup is very easy. We deployed this in two days, including installation, system setup, firmware upgrades, configuration, and network connection. By the next day, we were already deploying virtual machines. We initially began with the Blade system. As the migration to SAP HANA approached, it seemed prudent to upgrade our hardware. Consequently, we facilitated their transition from the Blade system to Synergy. Subsequently, we collaborated closely with the SAP consultancy company to oversee the migration process, ensuring seamless integration of all workloads and sub-environments. We have four people working on the deployment, including a project manager, two specialists, and one tech support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"We can pull out elements and change them ourselves."
"The active directory and file server are valuable features."
"Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have been stable and reliable over the last decade."
"Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers powered by Intel are easy to use, are easy to manage with OpenManage, and have extended support for five years."
"We are very satisfied with Dell in terms of servers and service. We are happy with Dell servers. They are aligned with our services. They are robust."
"The OpenMange console is effective."
"The fact that they came pre-installed was quite good. We didn't have to worry too much about that process... Also, the maintenance part makes it very easy to raise queries and get repairs done."
"I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame."
"Being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform is the most valuable aspect to me."
"Support is very helpful."
"The flexibility to link them together and configure them gives us the ability to scale out easily, to add more compute resources as needed... The way that they're scalable and flexible means we can add additional servers in quickly... We're not spending a lot of time doing procurement and building of physical servers."
"It's a fully integrated solution with OneView."
"In the data center, you see customers with a lot of blade enclosures and a lot of servers, and this solution works fine."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages."
"The product enables the centralization of all administrative tasks."
 

Cons

"Overall, the solution is excellent, though Dell could improve the monitoring."
"PowerEdge could have more configuration options, such as the ability to combine different CPUs, memory volumes, data storage, and memory. The new Intel-based ones are a bit power-hungry."
"The vendor must provide cheaper versions of the tool for smaller use cases."
"They could improve on the processor and security for the next release of the solution."
"Their support can be better. The speed of their support is not always great because the access to the data centers is sometimes complicated, so there is back and forth."
"We use PowerEdge servers in conjunction with VMware, a VCF Rack, and VxRail. That has worked out well. We are using it for firmware upgrades and other similar tasks. It's a one-stop shop, but it could be better when the servers aren't on a VCF stack. Profile handling and upgrading standalone servers could improve, but they have gotten better over the years."
"The T150 is a little bit bulky for what it is. I think if they created a T150 version with small form-factor drives, that would be an ideal solution. Currently, it is a tower box and it has quite a big footprint..."
"The BIOS interface could be improved; it is very poor. PowerEdge is very good overall, but if you compare the BIOS interface with HPE, it is not very good."
"We'd like to see faster networking in the back-end."
"It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure."
"The cost is quite high."
"Its management needs some work. It is not the best in terms of management. It has decent management. Its user interface can also be better."
"I think we were promised a little more than we were given. It's true, they are working very hard to try to help remedy that."
"I would really like a way to validate the firmware in my specific environment before trying to deploy it. Those were the issues we had early on with firmware upgrades, particularly around certificates. All in all, having some level of confidence aside from it just having been tested generically would help. Something more specific to my environment would be very helpful."
"I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version."
"ICMs could be better in this model. When you look at its competitors, the most critical point is the throughput. HPE is the best with the ICM module, which is an interconnect module that connects the servers of the frames to the LAN and SAN. HPE Synergy should also support the latest processors provided by Intel."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for this solution is reasonable. We pay a basic premium with a military premium on top of that."
"The solution’s pricing is competitive with other products."
"Dell is priced better than alternative solutions."
"We have not compared them with others. The price is okay, but they can always be a little bit cheaper."
"Dell's solution was cheaper than HP's solution."
"It's a bit of a shock when you have to find the money, but the pricing is very competitive, so I'm happy with that."
"This solution is reasonably priced and licenses are easy to acquire."
"It is very competitive. I have not been too involved in the licensing, but from a hardware perspective, I always find them to be competitive."
"It costs us around $60,000 a year."
"We are satisfied with its price."
"The price point is a little high. We were able to get a good deal on a promotion, to go with it. It would be nice to see the prices come down a little bit."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"The cost is high and that is a drawback for some customers."
"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."
"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 solution can be improved in terms of firmware backward supportability. With the sixteenth generation servers I am using, slightly older kernels and drivers are not supported. I have to use the ...
How would you choose between HPE's Bladesystem and Synergy?
For me, choosing between HPE’s Bladesystem and Synergy came down to which solution was more powerful, reliable, and stable. It turns out Bladesystem was the winner. Bladesystem is excellent because...
What do you like most about HPE Synergy?
It is a good product for hypervisors.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?
The pricing is relatively high compared to Cisco servers. However, due to the volume of my purchases, I get good discounts.
 

Also Known As

PowerEdge R
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.