> Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
I think it's a matter of scale and focus.
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
They're awful.