This 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

This 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.