Well, I just completed a purchase of 40 Dell servers.
Dell came in about 1450 a pop on the boxes. With identical configs, whiteboxes were 1380 (best price, 4 vendors), hp was a completely shocking 3700 ('but, we can maybe come down 10% - all these servers are commoditized so you're just paying for service,' the sales guy told me... ??), and IBM came in about 2200. This is for the EXACT same config (dual core p4 930s)
So, Apples to Apples, Dell is just a hare more expensive than whiteboxes, and for that, I would have to say that they are generally pretty easy to deal with.
Their consumer tech support is astoundingly bad. However, if you can get past the soho division into midmarket and get your own rep, you'll have a better experience. But to do that you're dropping at least 50k a year.
The biggest problem with Dell? It has to be Indian technical support. I nearly dropped them as a supplier after having similar experiences to some of the folks on this thread. The ONLY reason I'm still doing business with Dell is price, and damnit, I have to source ALL of my opteron boxes through whitebox vendors - what the heck are they thinking???!
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Well, I just completed a purchase of 40 Dell servers.
Dell came in about 1450 a pop on the boxes. With identical configs, whiteboxes were 1380 (best price, 4 vendors), hp was a completely shocking 3700 ('but, we can maybe come down 10% - all these servers are commoditized so you're just paying for service,' the sales guy told me... ??), and IBM came in about 2200. This is for the EXACT same config (dual core p4 930s)
So, Apples to Apples, Dell is just a hare more expensive than whiteboxes, and for that, I would have to say that they are generally pretty easy to deal with.
Their consumer tech support is astoundingly bad. However, if you can get past the soho division into midmarket and get your own rep, you'll have a better experience. But to do that you're dropping at least 50k a year.
The biggest problem with Dell? It has to be Indian technical support. I nearly dropped them as a supplier after having similar experiences to some of the folks on this thread. The ONLY reason I'm still doing business with Dell is price, and damnit, I have to source ALL of my opteron boxes through whitebox vendors - what the heck are they thinking???!
Jonathan