[skullone]

If you are buying a material amount of gear, and have your own internal accounting/finance people to establish proper etiquette in purchasing, Dell will never "lose" based on price. As customers, you can say what you're willing to spend on a solution, if you understand the BOMs and all the details and "the business rules" then Dell can be a good enough partner. We operated a hundred petabyte sized warehouse, and did it at the fraction of the cost of cloud services even factoring in engineers, networking, power and redundancy and DR.