I got an earful for ordering barebones machines -- Ordered the workstation equivalent of the 610/710 with same processor.
But you can't buy a machine that's dual processor ready unless you buy the processor from them now. They changed to a daughterboard setup on the workstation, so if you order it with 1 cpu expecting to upgrade later, you are SOL -- you have to buy a daughterboard from Dell, which, they won't sell you without a CPU. On the disks -- even though the machine has a SAS controller, if you don't order SAS disks from them they don't send you SAS connectors, but 2 separate SATA and power connectors that won't connect to a SAS drive. You need to buy the SAS connector separately from them later on. Used to be they just had the 1 connector that fit both SAS and SATA, but they made it so you have to buy SAS up front to get the connectors. They are getting real bad on this type of "Dell only" stuff in all areas, not just servers. Of course they refused to sell the disk caddies when the new systems came out -- because they were the only ones who had them at first. They aren't selling PC's anymore, as they are breaking the PC standards by including proprietary nonsense. They seem to be trying to go more that direction as time goes on -- I suspect the writing is on the wall for them and they are trying to squeeze more blood out of customers to stave off the inevitable. That is a really poor outlook as it only means they've given up trying to compete in the free market and think they need to use these underhanded methods in order to compete now. When they've lost confidence in their ability to compete on a level playing field, what does that say about them as a company? It's very sad, as I've been a Dell loyalist since the mid 90's. -l _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
