Dell PowerEdge XE vs Dell PowerEdge R – which one is right for your business?

For the first time since the cloud boom, businesses face a massive demand for local compute. Organizations need servers that can run local AI models, as well as bread-and-butter use cases for localized infrastructure, including virtual machines and databases.

Dell PowerEdge XE and Dell PowerEdge R series servers can meet all these needs and more, but it’s important to understand which one is best suited for the workloads you plan to run before you invest.

Uses for the Dell PowerEdge XE vs the Dell PowerEdge R

When deciding between the Dell PowerEdge XE and Dell PowerEdge R server families, it’s important for business leaders to understand their intended use cases.

The Dell PowerEdge XE series is Dell Technologies’ high-performance offering, with specialized GPUs for AI workloads and the most intense computational challenges. This is the absolute pinnacle of Dell Technologies’ server offering, configurable with the latest Nvidia, AMD, and Intel AI GPUs, as well as networking fabrics such as NVLink to connect massive amounts of data for AI training and inference.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, for example, requires enormous data processing for genomic research. The institute’s goal is to catalogue the genes of 1.5 million species by 2032, and so far it has generated over 100 petabytes of genetic sequence data. Since applying PowerEdge XE-series servers to the task, the organization has cut the time it takes to produce a genome from three every ten years to one every seven hours.

This is just one example of the intensity PowerEdge XE-series servers can handle; they can also carry out complex data analytics, fine-tune neural networks and machine learning algorithms, and run expanding large language models.

Dell PowerEdge R servers, in contrast, are load-bearing servers that can handle essential enterprise workloads such as private cloud, virtual machines, or databases.

For most enterprise tasks, the PowerEdge R series is already the best option. This hardware can run an organization’s entire infrastructure, such as a file server or database, with models like the PowerEdge R570 – described as “a great choice for businesses with big virtualization and storage plans” in our five-star review – already proving their worth for virtualization.

These are efficient servers that an enterprise can run far more economically than the PowerEdge XE-series, with the power to run common workloads in a very small form factor. With air-cooling and 2U rack-mounted offerings, they can also be quickly installed and scaled to suit business needs.

TL;DR: the Dell PowerEdge XE series is intended to meet the most strenuous computational needs an enterprise can demand at a local infrastructure level, while the PowerEdge R series is optimized for a blend of power and efficient performance for more aligned operating costs depending on workloads.

What makes the Dell PowerEdge XE better for intensive workloads?

The Dell PowerEdge XE is specifically designed to handle frontier AI demands and the most computationally intensive tasks enterprises seek to solve on premises. To meet these needs, PowerEdge XE servers are configurable with the latest GPUs and AI accelerators from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.

For example, the leading edge PowerEdge XE9780 can be purchased with up to eight Nvidia HGX B300 GPUs, delivering up to 144 petaflops of FP4 inference and 105 petaflops of training performance.

As a 10U chassis server, the PowerEdge XE9780 has room for disk arrays, numerous AI GPUs, and specialized cooling hardware.

PowerEdge XE-series servers’ networking components also offer extreme bandwidth and low latency to match their raw computational power with the right data transfer capabilities for AI training and inference.

In contrast, the PowerEdge R series are configurable with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors to deliver powerful performance for more standard workloads.

TL;DR: Dell PowerEdge XE-series servers are packed GPUs and networking hardware capable of training and inferencing frontier AI models and other massive enterprise workloads.

Dell PowerEdge XE vs Dell PowerEdge R energy use

Because Dell PowerEdge XE servers are more powerful than PowerEdge R servers, they also draw more power.

The Dell PowerEdge R series is intended for core enterprise workloads and therefore needs to run as efficiently as possible to deliver a low total cost of ownership.

In fact, the PowerEdge R770 CSP edition scored a world record efficiency score according to the SPECPower benchmark, which measures the performance of servers relative to their power consumption.

Efficiency improvements in both server families keep these units from biting into the bottom line. All Dell PowerEdge servers come with an Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), which can monitor power draw in real time and provide administrators with remote control over power allocation for individual servers.

Some PowerEdge XE-series servers, like the PowerEdge XE9680L, can also be configured as liquid-cooled solutions to deliver even better performance-per-watt.

Digital payments and financial services firm PhonePe has adopted Dell’s Direct Contact Liquid Cooling (DCLC) technology to cool its servers and achieve power savings in excess of $3 million per year. Across its site, which processes 185 million transactions per day, the business has taken its power usage effectiveness from 1.6 and reduced it to 1.35.

TL;DR: PowerEdge R-series servers demonstrate marked energy efficiency improvements over their predecessors, as well as lower overall energy consumption compared to PowerEdge XE-series servers. Both PowerEdge XE and PowerEdge R series servers are optimized for energy efficiency, with hardware and software features that allow administrators to raise the bar on local performance without sending their energy bills skyrocketing.

If you think Dell PowerEdge server could be right for your business, visit the Dell website to find out more.