I’m pretty hard on vendors.
I can be down right mean sometimes when arguing for what I think is right. When I am fed buzzwords and technobabbel or smell BS I call them out on it.
Free drinks, swag or fancy steak dinners won’t get my business. Price, performance and responsiveness to my input and problems will. (Though, I’ll certainly let you guys keep trying since I love steak).
When I find technologies or vendors I like I latch on to them and nerdgush about them on this blog or to my peers. The C-Series servers are a good example. They’re pretty cool and allow me to hit my goals for pricing, density and other features, but the real value is the Dell Data Center Solutions team. Other vendors may have good-enough products and better pricing, but they don’t have anything like these guys.
The thing I love most about the DCS team is that they listen and, moreover, they rapidly implement fixes and suggestions from their clients. In an organization as big and labyrinthine as Dell, they have this uncanny ability to get things done and advocate for their clients even when we’re not ordering tens of thousands of servers.
Sure, I have my problems on occasion, but they’re the same little problems you have with any other vendor. The difference is they’re always responsive and bend over backwards to fix these things rather than leaving you feeling feeling powerless, frustrated and on hold.
One time there was an order mixup on a RAID controller and one of my DCS guys (not a support engineer) happened to be near my Chicago data center where it should have ended up. He (miraculously) got ahold of one, showed up at my data center and installed it himself… like a bawse. These guys know what they sell 
Everytime I have a problem, absurd stuff like that goes down. They just get stuff done.
Most importantly they take product feedback seriously.
Evidence of that is in this video from Dell breaking down the C6100′s sucessor the C6220. Nearly every practical suggestion sent to DCS by myself (and other users whom I know) from the C6100 was implemented.
Hotness.
I can’t wait to get some of these on my racks.
