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I am a systems administrator.
I meant consumer products...should have been specific.
I have not worked with the enterprise type servers, except for a couple Dell poweredge...I hope HP, Compaq, and IBM do it better than Dell though. Nice once you can get it to fire up, but it was a mess out of the box...no joke.
I will take your word for it on the big boy's servers. For the amount you pay, I know they offer 24/7 exceptional service.
The consumer products from these companies are getting very bad...HP and Compaq being the worst.

I provide support for systems administrators, as well as training. I'm a Novell Master CNE and Master CNI (at least until they retired that program a few months ago).

I will agree with you for the most part. The consumer products suck for the most part. For single purcheses, I would recommend a clone over an HP Pavillion any day. UGH... One client had bought a few for their chiropractic office, and one hard drive failed around the time of the HP/Compaq buyout. What a nightmare. It wound up taking almost 3 months to get a 40GB IDE hard drive! After almost a week, I told them to buy a drive and I'd install it for no charge, and when the warranty replacement drive came it, it could just be kept on the shelf as a spare.

I haven't worked with that many Dell servers (only about 4), and haven't been that impressed. IBM is better, with HP (the old NetServer line, which has been discontinued), and finally Compaq being my favorite. I did 18 server upgrades for a major hospital in KC over a period of a few months, and we had no HW related problems at all. The Proliant servers are rock solid. Toys-R-Us is using 4 Compaq servers that were discontinued back in 1996 to run their electronic games distribution system! I have no reason to believe that newer systems will be any less reliable. Their dealer support and parts delivery is the best in the industry, rarely taking longer than next day for warranty replacements (3 year). And if that's not good enough, Compaq offers a 4hr reponse warranty, which includes taking an inventory of the server and making sure that at least one spare part of everything in the server is in a local warehouse!

Mark