Why Dell PowerEdge is the right fit for any data center need

When your business starts to roll out its AI strategy – if it hasn't already – you need to know your hardware will meet the needs of the moment. Whether it's light generative AI knowledge work run on premises or accurate searches across vast knowledge bases using the largest frontier LLMs, your choice of server matters.

Grand View Research projects the market for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – a computationally-intensive method for ensuring AI outputs are relevant, accurate, and up-to-date – will grow at a compound annual rate of 49.1% through 2030.

Enterprises looking to deploy AI for customer-facing roles using low latency, powerful hardware are the main driver of this trend.

Whatever your organization's demands, the Dell PowerEdge family of specialized servers delivers the processing power, scalability, and energy efficiency you need irrespective of workload. From the largest AI models to day-to-day analytics, Dell PowerEdge has your needs covered.

TL;DR: To run the most useful workloads for their needs, businesses must invest in the best hardware available. Dell PowerEdge meets demands across raw power, efficiency, and scalability.

What is the Dell PowerEdge XE series for?

The Dell PowerEdge XE series is Dell Technologies’ leading offering for high-performance and AI workloads. Organizations can use the PowerEdge XE series to fulfil demand for RAG, as well as to meet exploding demand for AI inference driven by agentic AI.

For example, Samsung has used the Dell AI Factory, which is rooted in PowerEdge XE9680 servers, to achieve RAG accuracy of up to 98%. Cloud software giant Zoho has also used the XE9680, validated in Dell AI Factory, to power its new Zia Agents feature and is building on these foundations to create an agentic AI builder platform for its 130 million users.

Depending on the needs of the facility in which they’re deployed, Dell PowerEdge XE servers are available in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations. For example, an enterprise with high-density racks looking to scale frontier AI models to meet high user demand can rely on the impressive thermal efficiency of liquid cooling to manage data center heat.

On the other hand, an organization looking to run large-scale, non-time-sensitive workloads may choose air cooling to handle the thermal demand of a low density rack.

TL;DR: the Dell PowerEdge XE series excels at the most leading edge, computationally-intensive tasks enterprises could seek to carry out. This includes deploying AI at massive scale, such as running inference or even training on a business-specific LLM, as well as high-performance computing to unlock new scientific breakthroughs.

What kind of AI GPUs does the Dell PowerEdge XE series use?

The Dell PowerEdge XE series offers a great deal of choice for enterprises when it comes to GPUs and accelerators, including flagship options from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.

For example, the PowerEdge XE9680 is configurable with either eight Nvidia GPUs (H100, H200 SXM5 700W, H20 SXM5 500W), eight AMD chips (Instinct MI300X 750W) or eight Intel chips (Gaudi 3 900W).

The wide range of configurations helps customers meet their specific needs, across performance, efficiency in specific stages of AI processing – such as using Gaudi 3 GPUs for decoding and B200 chips for prefill – and energy efficiency.

To support the distinct chip families, Dell has also equipped PowerEdge XE with a variety of networking configurations. This encompasses Nvidia’s NVLink, AMD’s Infinity Fabric, and the Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged RoCE Ethernet connectivity used by Intel.

Some PowerEdge XE offerings, such as the PowerEdge XE9680L, are only available with Nvidia GPUs; in this case, eight of either the Nvidia HGX B200 (SXM5, 1000W) or HGX H200 (SXM5, 700W) GPUs. Alongside these are two 5th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors that handle application logic, data flow, and general purpose tasks.

What is the Dell PowerEdge R series for?

The Dell PowerEdge R series is intended for core enterprise workloads such as data analytics, virtualization, and software-defined storage. These servers provide a variety of models offering can be run on premises with minimal demand for energy and space, which makes it ideal for businesses of any size.

The PowerEdge R series is already the most deployed PowerEdge server, with all models able to comfortably run traditional business workloads without compute issues or downtime. Because the PowerEdge R series is rack optimized it can be easily installed in any data center environment and scaled, while its highly customizable cooling options also make it easy to deploy across a range of sites.

Dell PowerEdge R servers are designed to suit the daily needs of all organizations, from small businesses to enterprises, as needs arise.

Organizations seeking an energy efficient option for business-critical processes can also turn to the Dell PowerEdge R series to meet their needs. The offering comes with energy-saving features across both its software and hardware, including dynamic power capping and an optimized thermal design, which add up to 91% improved performance per watt over previous models.

TL;DR: the Dell PowerEdge R series is the workhorse option for general purpose enterprise workloads, with a mix of power, scalability, and versatility that makes it incredibly dependable in the data center.

How does Dell PowerEdge support management and security?

The Dell PowerEdge XE and R series come with a multitude of features to help IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) easily roll out security patches and keep on top of server maintenance. These include OpenManage Enterprise and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 9 (iDRAC9), as well as built-in features for cyber resilience.

Every Dell PowerEdge server includes an integrated iDRAC (version varies by generation: iDRAC9 or iDRAC10) that enables automated, out-of-band server management from first power‑on. This allows management at scale even without a hypervisor or operating system.

To ensure the resilience and cybersecurity of data centers, all Dell PowerEdge servers come with factory-to-site assurance and full compatibility with zero trust approaches.

At the heart of the Dell PowerEdge management offering is OpenManage, Dell’s proprietary, one-to-many systems management console, OpenManage provides IT admins with a management console for remote fleet device management and at-scale lifecycle management, alongside compliance, automation, drift detection, and security controls.

All this is possible even without OS or hypervisors on hosts, via iDRAC integration 1. OpenManage is also compatible with VMware vCenter and Microsoft System Center, for cross-compatibility with existing infrastructure on premises and in the cloud.

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