I'm planning to get a ss2.4 or 2.8, and since I'm in Dallas, I'm considering purchasing an identical box for home for dev and such. Any chance you guys would tell who you buy the systems from? PM is fine. Thanks.

If I were to guess, I believe that the SM server ranges are pretty much whitebox built and installed by the build team. Probably only thePlanet servers which are probably bought as is.

When I talked to sales, they indicated that they were bought from a local company. I assumed that the servers came pre-assembled and any "adds" were done by SM's techs.

can you get the servers pre-build from SM, this could be an interesting idea - the SM computer store

Heck, I could setup shop at my place and start building these if there was enough of a profit margin in them, but it's tough to do nowadays unless they're custom-built middle to high-end machines.