Anyone every purchase / use hardware from <http://SiliconMechanics.com>?

Their prices seem to be unbeatable.

So I'm curious to know how reliable their servers are.

**Also, who do you recommend to buy the best bang for your buck on rack servers?**
['https://serverfault.com/questions/31361', 'https://serverfault.com', 'https://serverfault.com/users/-1/']
For the love of the flying spaghetti monster; don't ever pay retail.

We just did a large purchase from Dell for a bunch of servers, an EMC CX4 SAN, switches, load ballancers, etc. With full Microsoft licensing we paid easily 30-40% off the original quotes. It's all about having a good sales rep, and being able to negotiate when them and get them to work the partners for the best possible deals.
We've (company I work for) used Silicon Mechanics for a while. Probably >20 servers from them, many of them with weird requirements, from low-end stuff (single-CPU, single-disk web servers) to multi-core, multi-CPU 16-disk DB servers, to weird stuff like telephony servers. We even got some Windows XP(!) servers from them fairly recently, no problems at all.

Almost all of it has worked perfectly with no problems. We've only ever had problems with three machines (one had a bad HDD backplane, found with intense testing on arrival, one had some RAM fail after the better part of a year, and the other was just Western Digital's lovely quality control), and their support (we just have the standard warranty) has been excellent.