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Fetch a quote from Supermicro and tell your Dell or HP folks that you'll buy that if they don't match the price. If you're large enough, then you should be tal
by nixgeek 10y ago
Fetch a quote from Supermicro and tell your Dell or HP folks that you'll buy that if they don't match the price.
If you're large enough, then you should be talking to other folks including Wiwynn, ZT, Quanta, Celestica, et al.
They won't always get all the way there, depends on volume, but often they'll get pretty close, and it'll probably be a 25%+ additional discount vs. what they'll offer without you twisting their arm using a cheaper manufacturer as leverage.
They have to believe you're serious, obviously, which can mean visibly throwing a couple small orders to another manufacturer to tell your sales team they're not the only game in town.
In quality terms, Supermicro is worse vs. Dell/HP, which can still be fine if you've got enough scale to work through all the little issues with firmware.
- Rapzid 10y agoWe never had issues and I never noticed a quality issue over Supermicro vs Dell's and HP's at Rackspace. There were firmware niggles and updates with both; we were always upgrading server, storage card, and storage controller firmware at the Rack. I'm not privy to studies at scales large enough to tell which is higher quality. I'm not beholden to either though haha. If you can get Dell to come close to Supermicro prices then that might make sense. When I was last in the infrastructure game a few years ago we also ran into configuration limitations with Dell. At the time we could get more storage and RAM in the form factors we needed from Supermicro.
- nixgeek 10y agoThis is fair and buying at end of quarter or end of year is often the little extra kick needed to get Dell/HP to compete. One of my main beefs with Supermicro is their tooling around remote patching and configuration of BIOS and other firmware, they charge for it, on top of warranty, and the UX is awful. With both Dell and HP if you're under a support contract all the updates and tools to apply them are included, and whilst both manufacturers have some "sharp edges" to their tools for managing large fleets, neither is "stab yourself in the eyeballs with a blunt fork" bad like Supermicro.