On Jan 15, 2011, at 12:35 PM, Steve Wormley wrote: > For the Dell R610 we evaluated a couple months ago this is no longer true. > It worked just fine on my Ubuntu 64 bit desktop. Even virtual media worked > (which is something Sun/Oracle never seemed to have working on 64 bit Linux)
Please understand, I am not discounting the experience that anyone else has with Dell. I am simply relaying the experience that I have had with them, and what I have been told by other co-workers about what they did or did not like. Speaking for myself only, Dell had absolutely no compelling reason for us to buy them for the Unix group, because I could configure and buy Sun 1U servers that were better spec'ed and had better performance, for less money, than comparable Dell servers -- including all appropriate discounts on both sides. The primary thing that seemed to keep the Windows group going back and repeatedly buying from Dell was not their awesomely low price nor their ease of management, but the fact that Dell was one of two blanket purchase agreement vendors we had (Sun being the other one), and that the Dell sales reps had learned to get out of their own way -- give the appropriate Windows admins direct access to the intranet configurator site, and then give them a quick turnaround on producing an official quote for the hardware they already knew that they wanted. Being a BPA vendor meant that we didn't have to go through the complex RFP or bid processes, we could just go directly to the sales reps, tell them what we wanted, and then try to get their best price, or alternatively try to get the best configuration we could get for a particular given amount of money. Since Sun and Dell were the only two BPA vendors, this meant that they were going to be the only two who would be getting any significant business from us. In the Unix group, on the one big purchase that I helped coordinate (dozens of machines and hundreds of thousands of dollars), there was lots of back-and-forth with the vendor and the VAR to try to get the best price on the best quantity and configuration of machines, and there was lots of work trying to pick the package that gave us the best configuration we could get for the money -- and every time we went back and forth, they had to go up their chain of command to get approval from very senior people, and then we had to get a new official quote created for us. The Windows group didn't have to deal with any of that. They were given direct access to the systems to let them try out all the various possible hardware configurations, it would generate unofficial prices, and then all they had to do was to get the official Dell rubber stamp on those prices. For my part, I think the work we put in to get the best configuration and the best price was worthwhile, and I think we got better quality hardware with better performance and we spent less money overall to get it. But that's just my personal opinion. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
