Tier 1 Servers, or not

At work I always find myself buying stuff to make other stuff possible.

Recently we needed to make a small purchase of about $80k to complete a HA project I've been working on for a while. We decided to ask for quotes from both Dell and an IBM partner for this project, as we've been looking at diversifying our hardware base for a while now.

For some reason that doesn't have any bearing to this story, a company had been harassing one of my coworkers for the opportunity to quote on our hardware needs. They insisted they could save us money and replace our Dell servers with "Tier 1 hardware". This leads to a number of questions.

1. What is Tier 1 hardware?
2. Why do I want it?
3. How much is it worth?

The answers to these questions seem to be:

1. Anything not made by Dell
2. Because some sales person with a target for the month says so
3. More than any sane person should pay

For reasons I am yet to fathom, two quotes were provided by said company. Their quotation for the HP gear was around $90k and their quotation for the IBM gear was around $185k. So much for the saving money part of the bargain.

I find it hard to believe that IBM would actually charge such a premium for their gear. Turns out they don't, as a better specified quotation came in from our preferred IBM partner at around $80k. I've no idea where to start in figuring out how such things happen.

Regardless, I relayed this information back to the all-promising vendor and was told that they'd go back to HP to get a lower quote. They did so, sort of.

In the end I didn't bring the HP quotation to the boss as it was clear that I was getting a bad deal in many ways. The hardware on offer featured higher prices, a lack of integrated management, fewer NICs and a complete lack of redundant and hot-swappable cooling. 

I sent a very to-the-point message to the all-promising-supplier after the fact, quoted verbatim here:

Hi Supplier-Representative-7G,

I've spoken with my MD and he's looked at the quotations we received from Dell, yourself and another IBM partner.

For a number of reasons, such as the HP servers lacking redundant cooling and being the most expensive options by far, we've opted not to engage All-Promising-Supplier as a hardware supplier.

Best regards,

Methodology F

Yet, my phone rings at regular intervals, displaying the number of Supplier-Representative-7G. I do not answer these calls, yet still they come.

The next lesson shall be "Tier 1 connectivity, or not"