bargain shopping :: a recent Dell PowerEdge server purchase

My company needed to buy a Dell PowerEdge 6850. As the only systems engineer and the resident tough-nose bargainer, I was tasked to find a good deal and fast. I ended up buying a "certified refurbished" from Dell Outlet for about $5700. The specs are like:

• quad Xeon 3.66GHZ/1M
  
• 16G DDR2 ECC RAM (2G chips)
• 2x 146G drive (in RAID1) + 3x 300G drive (in RAID5). Ultra320 scsi, 10K RPM
  
• rapid rails
• CDRW/DVD ROM combo + floppy drive
  
• dual power supply
• RAC card
  
• 3-year NBD warranty (bronze)
• ship the next day.
  

The viable options I had were:

• $13,000, for a brand-new from Dell Business. Drives are smaller: 2x73G + 3x146G drive. ship in two weeks or so. no RAC card.
  
• $8,900, used, from an eBay store. 90-days warranty and no rails. no RAC card.
  
• $8,500, new, from yet another eBay store. 3-year NBD (till March 2009), with quad 3.16GHZ/1M Xeon CPU. ship in a week. no RAC card.
  
• NA, from two local VARs. After a few days of hunting for a Dell (with enough profit margin, I guess), they started asking me whether a Compaq can be quoted instead.

For the Dell Outlet purchase itself,

• Initially I thought it's hard to cut the red tape (PO, approval, and stuff) fast enough to close the deal online. Fortunately, I talked to a Dell representative. He told me I could simply email/phone him of my pick so he can take it offline and hold for me for a few days. How nice!
• On top of that, I asked for 'best offer' from Dell Outlet, saying that I had quotations roughly $2k under Dell's price for a similar server. Similar alright, the quotations had slower CPU, or smaller HDD, or less denser RAM chips, or lesser days in warranty, or all the above. It is a small bluff :) The fellow said he'd check with his people. Next thing you know, he came back the next day and slashed the online price by $1977. With that, I had no hesitation whatsoever to ink the deal right away, before it disappears!

The lesson I took from this round of bargain shopping is "Do your homework". Know how much they differ before you even ask for a quotation. Don't overlook or dismiss too quickly the value of bigger GB/RPMs/Cache of the drives, bigger density of the memory chips, bigger GHZ/cache of CPUs, since they can cost you dearly enough to shift a nice-looking quotation from a bargain to a bargain look-like! Like they say, details kill.