Parlee,
You most certainly can have a machine that is DOA. It is called in the industry "infant mortality" it has nothing to do with children though
🙂.
Most OEM vendors track a large number of metrics and report them "when positive of course". Infant mortality is factored into things like MTBF, MTBR and MTTR. All of these are important in the decision to purchase a piece of equipment (notice i did not say a PC or server but equipment). These metrics could be reported all the way down to a SMD on a board (not likely though).
Read
THIS!
It covers alot of this information.
For those of you that are thinking only on the level of price for a product such as the cheaper Newegg.com server. There are more things to it than just the initial pricing of a product. There are warranty considerations (and yes they might break even the one put together by the best builders). There are considerations for parts turnaround. There are considerations for partnering.
The total cost of a product is NOT the initial purchase price.
COST of ownership = Maintainability (can the problem be found and reparied quickly)
+
SLAs or (Service Level Agreements usually spec'd as a percentage and usually as a four nines, for instance or 99.99% availability)
+
Downtime (this is either next to nothing or a great amount of money due to lost revenue).
+
The need to upgrade sooner rather than later (money is associated with this too since a greater or shorter longevity of what becomes your legacy systems)
+
BTUs (cooling requirements) yes these are important.
+
Power requirements.
+
Footprint (size of servers) 1U, 2U, a whole rack?
+
Training of the maintenance personnel on proper maintenance/upkeep procedures.
+
Possibly on site FEs or Field Engineers.
+
MTBF (costs money although not always apparent)
+
MTBT (costs money although not always apparent)
+
MTTR (costs money although not always apparent)
As you can see there are a whole lot of things to think of not just the price of the server. There are more areas than these to concen yourself with when making a decision. This is not your PC sitting next to you that could fail and only tick you off. These are revenue producing business systems that could possibly make or break a company and tick off millions of customers.
For the mom and pop organization that needs a single server maybe Dell is not the best option. It also could be the best option.
There is more to this arguement than it costs $$$$ vs $$$$$.
Dell especially in the enterprise market competes with the likes of HP, IBM, Sun.... All of these would be considered expensive at first glance. But for a lifecycle they could be extremely efficient and cost effective based on performance of the above stated items.
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