Facebook chooses DIY servers over Dell, HP options
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Then offer to pay less. Sales people are annoying, but they can work to your advantage if you play ball.
There is no justification in having those sales people around. They have absolutely zero technical information that I need, they're just sitting on the price. I know that my interaction with them and their skill in ripping me off is paying their salary - but I want them gone. Send them home, they are completely unnecessary legacy cruft. They are costing companies like Dell real money in lost sales. A few days ago I was talking to a sysadmin friend of mine, he feels the same way. I know I'm not alone in this.
While we're talking about Dell and parasitic cruft, they should reconsider their mandatory commercial operating systems policy as well. It's nearly impossible to buy many of their servers without an OS already on them.
I have not had the same experience as you with Dell; we have an established "medium business" account and get pricing online that generally reflects our base discount. We can sometimes get more off by dealing with those salespeople (especially if it's near a quarter end), but in general we get a fair and predictable price, visible on the web site. Servers show up (sometimes later then I'd like) configured as ordered, and just need put into a rack and powered on.
Our "server specialist" certainly isn't the most technical guy in the world, but he knows the hardware line in and out, knows what works, and what other people are using for similar projects.
I regularly buy servers with no OS (if I'm reusing an old MS license), or with Redhat (my standard OS) at a price competitive with others.
I'm done defending Dell though; and don't think I'm arguing there is no room for improvement. At the very least, one's experience with Dell seems to vary wildly depending on account reps and established agreements and processes. There is no reason our experiences should be so different.
Very hard, because the other side of the transaction wants to sell stuff at a non-transparent and very high price.
Oh, BTW, you can get all your server needs on NewEgg by just clicking on the buy button. They even carry my favorite brand, Super Micro.
It felt a little risky spending so much money with a smaller company, but so far so good. I thought I was going to have a heart attack when of the $(five-figure) boxes was severely damaged in shipping, but they handled it beautifully and painlessly.
The big gain in outsourcing something like this/buying an "off the shelf" solution is that you don't get exactly what you want, but you get it cheaper because the people you buy it from are doing it at volume.
When you need a solution as specialized as Facebook, it doesn't surprise me that the big players are unwilling to break their service offerings/support model (at a competitive price), because they are more concerned with keeping their own costs down. They don't want to have to hire people to support a special infrastructure for just one customer...
Thus, Facebook gets what they need and at a better price by doing it themselves.
Since I've been buying computers I've never seen this to be the case. I have yet to see a single time that buying a prepackaged computer of any brand was cheaper than buying the parts on e.g. pricewatch and building it myself.
Dislcaimer: I've always built machines with an eye towards gaming so maybe at the very low end this isn't the case. I'd be surprised even then.
It's also much easier to keep your server room homogeneous when you use off-the-shelf machines. As a custom builder, your parts will necessarily change over time as this or that part becomes unavailable, but goliaths like Dell can keep the exact same machine available for purchase for years.