An interesting story needs to be told, one of my pursuit to ascertain qualified system specifications and pricing to meet the future needs of Network Redux.
As many of you know, we hold strong premier affiliation with Dell Servers/Storage and datacenter technologies. Throughout this rampant, yet wonderful, usage of cost effective Dell servers and storage, it came to mind that we should also consider some of the other players out there, specifically Sun Microsystems given their recent unveiling and embracing of Opteron technologies and Open Source activism.
So one regular afternoon I jumped onto sun.com, filled out a basic contact form and filled in our information, and our interest for purchasing 3-5 of their 1U and 2U opteron series (Sun Fire x2100 x4100 x4200) and we were in need of these immediately.
To briefly explain how Sun differs from Dell’s direct marketing and sales — Sun authorized resellers are responsible for handling the point of purchase/installation of Sun products. Contacting sun directly will almost always result in them locating a reseller in your immediate area.
Interestingly enough, the idea quickly passed, as I had gone nearly 2 weeks without hearing a word, and I had no interest in scouring for a reseller when my primary interest was getting someone on the phone who could answer our detailed questions regarding their architecture, power consumption and cooling requirements, warranty, etc.
Then the phone rang, this was someone at Sun who was apologizing for the delayed response. At this point our server batch had already been ordered through Dell, (takes approximately 5 minutes to configure an order, email it to the account exec who then drops the pricing by about 15-20% usually increasing it to Gold support as well — order same day, automated and easy.)
I entertained the conversation as I still needed to rule their products in or out for any future deployments. She routed me to a reseller in the portland area, who was prompt to give me a call same day. We discussed a broad range of topics, the most excrutiating being the inability to go larger than 73GB with their 2.5″ SAS (serial attached scsi) disk drives. Our current builds utilize RAID 5 arrays of 4x146GB, and to drop below this would almost be a waste of the 2 units of space.
We kept talking, I gave him a list of our needs and current Dell builds, and he said that I would receive a return call shortly. That same day we were discussing possible builds, which turned into a rather interesting, and unsettling discussion.
At this point the reseller needed to build us a server identical to the Dell PowerEdge 2850s we were running, and with all of his available resources he was unable to match the drive specifications, or even come close. He then transformed the discussion from one of buying a few servers, to one of replacing our entire line of Dell servers, with Sun, and adding a high capacity SAN solution to make up for the lacking disk drives across the board.
This conversation had become one of a customer wishing to try out a few servers, to one of Sun wishing to replace our entire operations with Sun Servers/Storage, literally taking the Dell servers out and putting their own servers in, assisting in this migration. I knew the answer was no, not going to happen, no way in hell, I’m not even impressed with the Sun business model, why would I consider migrating our entire operations to their architecture?
I gave him a day to brew up some numbers, just to see how far off in the land of taking it too far they actually were. The next day the phone rang, we went over some figures, I gave him a moderate list of the various problems that would occur with such a transition, specifically the large amounts of live data web/email/database that is being updated 24/7/365. He promised a call back next day, I didn’t promise to pick up the phone.
The moral of this story is that Sun and Dell have differing strategies in just about every category of delivering small business services. I thoroughly admire the Dell inventory supply model, as well as their direct marketing and sales. More often than not the pricing passed down to a premier dell customer is higher than the pricing one would find in the small business section of dell.com — it is quite clear that Dell is serious about selling servers and networking technologies to small businesses, without making them jump through reseller hoops or unrealistic and drastic recommended system design changes.
That’s all I’m going to say on this matter, for now we proudly remain Dell Powered.
This entry was posted on April 14, 2006, 4:41 am and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Dell vs. Sun, or Sun vs. Consumer?
An interesting story needs to be told, one of my pursuit to ascertain qualified system specifications and pricing to meet the future needs of Network Redux.
As many of you know, we hold strong premier affiliation with Dell Servers/Storage and datacenter technologies. Throughout this rampant, yet wonderful, usage of cost effective Dell servers and storage, it came to mind that we should also consider some of the other players out there, specifically Sun Microsystems given their recent unveiling and embracing of Opteron technologies and Open Source activism.
So one regular afternoon I jumped onto sun.com, filled out a basic contact form and filled in our information, and our interest for purchasing 3-5 of their 1U and 2U opteron series (Sun Fire x2100 x4100 x4200) and we were in need of these immediately.
To briefly explain how Sun differs from Dell’s direct marketing and sales — Sun authorized resellers are responsible for handling the point of purchase/installation of Sun products. Contacting sun directly will almost always result in them locating a reseller in your immediate area.
Interestingly enough, the idea quickly passed, as I had gone nearly 2 weeks without hearing a word, and I had no interest in scouring for a reseller when my primary interest was getting someone on the phone who could answer our detailed questions regarding their architecture, power consumption and cooling requirements, warranty, etc.
Then the phone rang, this was someone at Sun who was apologizing for the delayed response. At this point our server batch had already been ordered through Dell, (takes approximately 5 minutes to configure an order, email it to the account exec who then drops the pricing by about 15-20% usually increasing it to Gold support as well — order same day, automated and easy.)
I entertained the conversation as I still needed to rule their products in or out for any future deployments. She routed me to a reseller in the portland area, who was prompt to give me a call same day. We discussed a broad range of topics, the most excrutiating being the inability to go larger than 73GB with their 2.5″ SAS (serial attached scsi) disk drives. Our current builds utilize RAID 5 arrays of 4x146GB, and to drop below this would almost be a waste of the 2 units of space.
We kept talking, I gave him a list of our needs and current Dell builds, and he said that I would receive a return call shortly. That same day we were discussing possible builds, which turned into a rather interesting, and unsettling discussion.
At this point the reseller needed to build us a server identical to the Dell PowerEdge 2850s we were running, and with all of his available resources he was unable to match the drive specifications, or even come close. He then transformed the discussion from one of buying a few servers, to one of replacing our entire line of Dell servers, with Sun, and adding a high capacity SAN solution to make up for the lacking disk drives across the board.
This conversation had become one of a customer wishing to try out a few servers, to one of Sun wishing to replace our entire operations with Sun Servers/Storage, literally taking the Dell servers out and putting their own servers in, assisting in this migration. I knew the answer was no, not going to happen, no way in hell, I’m not even impressed with the Sun business model, why would I consider migrating our entire operations to their architecture?
I gave him a day to brew up some numbers, just to see how far off in the land of taking it too far they actually were. The next day the phone rang, we went over some figures, I gave him a moderate list of the various problems that would occur with such a transition, specifically the large amounts of live data web/email/database that is being updated 24/7/365. He promised a call back next day, I didn’t promise to pick up the phone.
The moral of this story is that Sun and Dell have differing strategies in just about every category of delivering small business services. I thoroughly admire the Dell inventory supply model, as well as their direct marketing and sales. More often than not the pricing passed down to a premier dell customer is higher than the pricing one would find in the small business section of dell.com — it is quite clear that Dell is serious about selling servers and networking technologies to small businesses, without making them jump through reseller hoops or unrealistic and drastic recommended system design changes.
That’s all I’m going to say on this matter, for now we proudly remain Dell Powered.
This entry was posted on April 14, 2006, 4:41 am and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.