Balling on a budget

I would try to frame it differently. How much support do you have from your direct management? You’re having to spend time troubleshooting issues that are clearly hardware-related. They set the budget but you’re as much of a stakeholder as anyone - you have to provide support and management for whatever they buy. Get on calls with the vendor or GM and just flat out say “after profiling the active production workload, the minimum specifications required exceed the minimum recommendations. The original servers were spec’d based on the vendor recommendation, but now we know the workload in our real environment and don’t have to guess.” Then give them a couple quotes from Dell. Give a couple reasonable but properly-sized options. If you have a Dell account you can do some value engineering - build based on different base options, play with different combinations (I.e. a different CPU or Backplane or Riser may give you extra options or just flat out cost less for no reason on base config A vs base config B). I can usually shave off ~20% with a few hours of playing around. Make sure to include iDRAC Enterprise. Present the options, including clear expectations that it must remain under warranty and be lifecycled when the warranty ends since it’s a production application. Sorry for the rant, but I work on the opposite side from you at a vendor as a solutions architect. I’m regularly on sales/planning calls including with clients. I see what gets budget and what never gets funded. My only horse in the race is our apps performing well. I don’t ask and I don’t care how much commission the AM makes. I guarantee the GM gets a generic datasheet from the sales guy with minimum specs that are usually out of touch with reality. The GM just sees anything above the minimum as unnecessary cost because, he was told the application will technically run on that. Most of the time, if a guy like this gets firm, unambiguous pushback from IT with a clear next step and understood total costs, he’ll accept your recommendation. The vendor just wants to get the deal done so they certainly aren’t going to disagree that it would be better with better specs if IT says so. Tl;dr for OP: You sometimes just have to be a roadblock to the project instead of letting yourself be a speed bump. Make it a 1 or a 0 with an easy yes.