Moving from white boxes

At work I am keen to move away from white boxes to something say listed on Red Hat’s HCL.

Pain.

IBM
* Unable to find a midi tower with my specs in mind
* Unable to quote over the Internet
* Take forever to quote from what I’ve heard
* Stupid promotion with renting a server…
* Too expensive :(

HP
* Unable to quote over the Internet
* Stupid size of company questions. I KNOW THE SPEC THAT I WANT.
* Minimum requirements of software. FFS
* Too many unneccessary questions
* Awful Website, awful URLs, awful navigation…
* Microsoft 2003 server

DELL
* Terrible Website, terribly long forms, URLs make little sense
* Asking me for too much information like the size of company and applications! FS.
* Getting put on hold and transferred to two different sales people and then onto an engineer in Bangalore
* Still takes seemingly forever to quote
* Seem to settle on a SC1420
* Eventually get an email quote with PDF attachment with 200AUD knocked off the quote given over the phone. I hate these annoying Dell promotion codes.
* Difference in RAID-1 solution and non-RAID solution is like 1000AUD. That’s insane.
* Trying to get me to buy 4×512 RAM instead of 2×1G. Honestly…
* Seem to be unable to refer to a Web form to complete payment. FS. Looks like I have to call them up voice if I want buy this. ARGH!

Update: Another email from Dell with a large PDF and survey, saying if we order today, we get 100AUD off! Instead I’ve decided to buy local a rack and cabinet from our dedicated server hosts, Hostcentral. The price in the end wasn’t far from Dell’s quote and it was a more “professional” rack format.

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