Mark, In the past you have flowed about the wonders (price) of Dell on the Seattle tech startups mailing list. One stumble in the relationship, and you're tell

Mark, In the past you have flowed about the wonders (price) of Dell on the Seattle tech startups mailing list. One stumble in the relationship, and you're telling the world how awful they are. You even went so far as to publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep. This type of public bullying might not produce the desired outcome. That is, if your desired outcome is to get a good price on your server and maintain a relationship with your vendor. Sales reps are human beings, fallible and fraught with human problems. Perhaps your rep came down with a certain flu and forgot to tell his/her customers who their secondary is. As a customer of Dell, I keep all of my "sales team"'s contacts in a text file, for this very reason. (For the record, I hate dealing with Dell, and choose HP or Sun whenever I have the option.) If you feel Dell is untrustworthy, consider moving on. HP and Sun are superior alternatives who are willing to match Dell's price. You just need to know how to work the channels (for HP call up CDW, for Sun look for Tim Van Loan). Also, Supermicro resellers like Silicon Mechanics, PogoLinux, or Penguin Computers sell servers comparable to Dell's crappy commodity hardware, and will likely beat Dell's server offerings. From an infrastructure management point of view, your model is broken if you cannot afford a few extra days in provisioning. Consider multiple suppliers, or rethinking the model. Cloud and Dedicated server models are designed towards infrastructures that require rapid resource provisioning.