It could very well be scrap metal behind the "iron."
Re Bilgepipe.
But on a serious note, based upon my experience with Dell lately -- and thank you, Dell, for enabling me to sell a good number of servers while you flail -- I would wager that the server buckled under the strain of aggravated customers wanting to know where the fsck their servers are which were promised for delivery sometime last month.
I amusingly envision Dell Selling off one or more servers from within its infrastructure just to keep some customers happy.
Colleagues and I have opined that this may be the beginning of a uncontrollable tail-spin for Dell as it retools to do things just like every other second-rate, crappy vendor on the market. The small- to mid-level arena is suffering as Dell joins the ranks of other vendors who provide fantastic enterprise-quality (and expensive) massive servers or complete shit. Those are your only two choices. Yeah, I am so happy to see that Dell is now in pretty much every store you visit. How is that quantity making up for quality doing for you, Michael?
Eh, not to be disingenuous, I know Dell has had a habit of dressing up a $5 hooker to look like a $50 whore, that is, workstation class equipment dressed up like a server for the low-end. But at least their mid-tier stuff was made of better parts, you know, a $500 call-girl slumming for $100 because business is slow and she needs the money. Of course, if you also caught on that business should never be slow for a call-girl, then you also catch the crux of my argument -- obviously, something is rotten in Round Rock.
And at the same time Dell has made itself known amongst many of my customers and colleagues as a rock-solid provider, with the exception of certain support types. At least, that was the norm, now seemingly the exception. I would recount recent conversations with Dell's gold server team, one of which was about the prospect of fitting a customer-owned DLT drive into a new server, only to be told that it would not work as Dell now only sells rail kits at the time of purchase with associated hardware. Bunk? Perhaps, but direct from the horse's mouth and an ultimate obstruction to the purchase.
Paris, something rotten this way comes.