I gotta say that over the years I feel that Dell has burned a hole into my heart producing cheapo equipment just to make the sale. Well in the past 2-3 years it seems that Dell has really kicked the quality of their product line up a few notches. Today I was working with a client on our Managed Colocation service, we needed to order his servers so we went ahead assembled them on the website then called dell.
To my surprise the business sales rep was quick to load up the saved cart and begin to check it over with us. After we made sure everything was listed correctly the rep instantly told us that he could save $600 on the R710 and $400 on the R610, We didn’t even begin to haggle him. After we agreed on that pricing we then made the one and only request to get more for our money, we asked for idrac enterprise on both servers for free, our wish was granted instantly.
Typically we buy all of our servers through a reseller but for this particular client I felt ordering direct would be a much better experience for them and it paid off. I have to give my congrats to Dell on earning back my trust in there sales team, I’m absolutely happy to work with them and to use there new servers.
On a side note for any one looking at buying a new OEM server the R610/R710 are absolutely phenomenal buys, and they come with the newest intel E5600 series CPUs.
Update: June 17th 2010.
Dell shipped the servers 2 days ago (Wednesday) they some how got the incorrect address and sent them to the entirely wrong state, thankfully we caught it and had them redirected to the correct destination. I think this is terrible on dells part, not to mention they confirmed the address multiple times.
Update: June 21st 2010.
The servers in fact arrived at the WRONG address. After several calls to dell with no resolution I contacted one of my Business reps at dell and within an hour received a call with an “upgraded” server being shipped overnight to the CORRECT address. They added a 2nd CPU and 15k SAS disk vs 7200 SATA Disk.
We will see when it gets here if it was worth the wait, the other server is scheduled to arrive tomorrow without issue.