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Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs HPE Synergy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (3rd), Data Center Networking (4th), Rack Servers (1st)
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Javier Domingo - PeerSpot reviewer
A robust server that integrates well and consumes less energy
Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped us improve in terms of ecology. Energy expenditure is an important part of our company's philosophy. We have changed to a more clean mindset, so now, we have to be eco-friendly, and it was one of the best things we chose to do. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have the PowerEdge Cyber Resilient Architecture approach to security. I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten in terms of security. I never give a ten because there is always room for improvement, but Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have truly been very effective. They are very good in terms of energy consumption. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are agile for handling the evolving needs of high-performance workloads. They are perfectly aligned with our sustainability goals. We were looking for the company's line to be all eco-friendly, and therefore, they aligned with our decisions and needs. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce everything. We had to make a change when we suffered a cyber attack, and after we changed the solution, it became 100% effective. In other words, we have not had any service outages at any time, and the truth is that we are very happy. We use the OpenManage console. We are happy, and we do feel that our company has improved, but our productivity has always been at a very high level. In terms of the effect of using PowerEdge Rack Servers on the overall flexibility of our operations or business, the thing is that we implemented it while our company was dealing with a change of mentality. It has affected us for the best because it has accompanied us in that change of mentality.
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 initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"What we like the most is the stability. Without shutdowns, our VMs and servers are up and running fine."
"Its approach to user security measures is valuable. We haven't experienced any major issues, and the solution has been working really well."
"Primarily, what we value most is the stability of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers."
"Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are easy to manage and install, and it gives us a lot of time to do other things."
"I like a feature they call iDRAC. It's a feature that allows you remotely power on and off the server."
"This means that if you would scale up linearly, one person could take care of 3000 Servers. That's quite impactful. Google published three people for 1000. We are doing one person for 3000. That allows us to free human resources for other tasks."
"I like the Dell EMC management and we have a great management interface. They are very reliable and we can trust the server. It's very reliable and easy to manage."
"Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us."
"The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity."
"The stability of the solution is very reliable."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward. The infrastructures as code enables you to fill out the configuration before you even deploy it, then it is just a one-touch deployment."
"In terms of managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing complexity... We've taken one of our virtualization guys and turned him into a Synergy guy, and he's been able to understand the networking, he's been able to understand the OneView, he's been able to understand the Synergy. He manages all of those rather than our having to have multiple teams associated with it."
"There is no problem with the scalability."
"The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want."
 

Cons

"Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are competitive, but there is room for energy efficiency improvement considering the thermal design and power consumption."
"I've had some trouble where the customers are not happy with the Toshiba drives, and it's a challenge when it comes to specific requests for Dell to a non-deviate, and only use Seagate drives."
"Although PowerEdge's price is high."
"It takes a long time to deliver the hardware. The riser cards can be better. The riser cards are where the PCI cards connect. They need to have more than two riser cards in the server because it can be difficult to connect sometimes."
"The security of this solution could be improved. We have very specific needs as an engineering company and require multiple layers of security. This is not offered when implementing the Dell hardware."
"The scalability could improve. If you want more scalability and high availability, you will have to change to a solution similar to VxRail."
"Occasionally, there might be extended wait times between placing an order and receiving the delivery."
"My biggest grievance is related to getting a caddy. We have decommissioned our old servers that we used for development or testing. You cannot buy hard drives for old servers from Dell. It is very annoying."
"The main challenge we faced was that when it was installed it just did not work. There were faulty components and it took weeks of troubleshooting to find the faulty components, get them replaced. Getting help from HPE was difficult. Nobody knew about the product. It was a brand-new product and people had not been trained on it. That part was not a great experience."
"They must improve the OneView tools."
"Technical support was time consuming and unsatisfactory. The initial product setup was complex, lasing around three weeks to a month."
"There is certainly a feature or two missing."
"Over the two years of using HPE Synergy, we have found some hardware failures that are frequent in the SOP models, CNA cards, and converged network adapters. These failures are frequently happening for a lot of the customers."
"Technical support for this solution has a very good initial response; however, escalation takes time, and most of the time the first level of support cannot solve your case."
"The performance could be better. The converged network cards initially didn't work. However, later on in the newer version, they came up with 50 GB network cards to replace the 20 GB ones, and it's perfectly fine now. At times, it could also be more stable."
"Changes to the solution are quite complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for this solution is competitive compared to others on the market."
"The price is good for the quality of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers."
"There is room for improvement in making it more cost-effective."
"The tool's pricing is very good."
"The pricing is very good because there are a lot of types of PowerEdge Rack Servers. You have the R540, R640, and R740. The prices are very scalable through the specific server, e.g., small businesses can take the R640 while large businesses can take the R740 or R840. Thus, Dell technologies touch on every organization."
"It's abundantly clear that the specific licensing requirements will be dictated by the intricacies of the machinery we deploy."
"They seem to have become more expensive. I've not done a comparison with other vendors recently. If the price increases more, we would need to do a comparison next year just to make sure that we are benchmarking our server purchases correctly."
"It has generally been very competitive. It is not the best, but it is very competitive."
"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
"We are satisfied with its price."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now."
"We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."
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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?
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. You want t...
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.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.