I opened up a case with Dell Customer Support. It was a bizarre phone call to say the least. I had to explain my issue about 3 times to the first guy and then was transferred to a server engineer. The Engineer started grilling me as to why I needed to download the ESX hypervisor and why am I  "changing the OS of your server". He then questioned me as to why I need to download firmware updates and if something was wrong. I almost hung up at that point but stuck in there. I explained that these were brand new in the box servers with no OS installed on them from the factory. I also explained that it's our policy to update all firmware on newly deployed production servers. It was unreal. He then confirmed that FTP is down for everyone (he heard from another group that the permissions "got wiped out". He didn't believe me when I told him I couldn't download a file from the Dell Support site. After much back and forth he finally tried himself and confirmed my suspicion that the problem is on their end. He basically said there's nothing they can do and to just keep trying. Great... Next time I'm buying Proliants.  
Is the Dell Enterprise FTP site down or having issues?  I've got several servers i'm attempting to perform updates on via the lifecycle controller and keep getting FTP Authentication failed- enter correct user name and possword and retry.  Any suggestions/info?
Enterprise FTP