If there’s one thing you expect Dell to know, it’s computers. And although that assumption may be baseless when you’re talking to a CSR from the Orient, telling you the only solution to your monitor being broken is to wipe your hard drive and reinstall, if you’re a business-class customer, talking to your Dell contact to set-up a RAID, you at least hope that they have an inkling of what they are doing.

But au contraire! Dell Business’ enthusiastic recommendation of 4 SCSI drives and a RAID controller to Matt B. not only led to him flushing $2000 down the toilet, but his entire business’ network to be fried. As he so expertly puts it, “Dude, we got f’ed in the A!”

Matt’s email, after the jump:

A week and a half ago, my cohort noticed that our small company’s email server was nearly out of space. Not only is the email server a two year old Dell, Dell has also always hooked us up reasonably well on price and support. So their business advisor people suggested to my suggestible coworker that a RAID controller and a few more SCSI drives could handily take our one small SCSI drive and turn it into a bigass RAID 5 array. They assured him it was the easiest thing ever and the whole process would be quick and painless. This was important because we were already aware that our exchange/active directory setup was extremely fragile since we’d installed both programs on the same computer back in the dark ages. We trusted them and bought 1500 bucks worth of recommended hardware (4 drives, one pci-x scsi raid controller) to avoid a long difficult migration to one of our more modern servers.

Cautiously optimistic, he went to our colo last night with the goods in hand and called up Dell to have them walk him through the process (3 times) before he was willing to change anything. Two hours later, I recieved a curt call that “the server is fried, this could take a while. I’ll call you when it’s back up.” This morning at 5:40 I got a text message that “The old server got wiped out, I had to put everything on the new servers.” Turns out Dell’s bliss came from ignorance. Or they just wanted our money. Either way, they lied to us to sell us over a grand in hardware and then calmly walked him through the steps to destroy our working setup and nearly screwed our whole company over. It’s only because he pulled an overnighter to setup a less fragile system that we’re able to communicate with our clients today. Dude, we got f’ed in the a!

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