Choosing Your Server Vendor

I was treated to a special day this week when HP invited me to bring a customer to see the future products & road map for the next twelve months. They insisted I sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I cannot elaborate on the content of the day here. What I did observe was the amount of work an OEM has to make to differentiate themselves not only against each other, but the immense army of "white goods" manufacturers who can also bash out Intel/AMD servers. As a hobby project, I times built my own PC from a pile of bits bought from the equivalent of Radio Shack. It is not that hard, but I would not recommend it other than educational purposes because by the time you finish there will be a less expensive off the shelf version.

So why recommend a branded server?

Quality. Not the enclosure & form factor, but the purchasing power of the immense, HP, IBM, Dell & Oracle, can get the cream of the chip fabricators pile at a cost point lesser players cannot.

Provisioning & Management. Getting the Lights Out Management (LOM) to work consistently is a challenge that requires engineering work beyond PXE boot & a remote CD-ROM drive.

Support. With brand, comes reputation, & the immense are keen to protect theirs. By example, Apple, the current tremendous star of consumer market, mucked up the launch of their flagship product, iPhone4. There was an issue with the antenna that made connections unreliable. It took Apple a month to acknowledge the issue & present a fix, but the storm of criticism seriously damaged the brand. Apple's customers forgave them but the lesson to even the mightiest corporate is, "always protect the brand."

So is there nothing to select between the immense? I would say from an engineering point of view they enjoy throwing stones at each other but the difference is small & can close quickly. However, culturally they are poles apart. I think to pin multibillion dollar organisations down to a line is daft, so here goes:

Oracle, focused on optimisation the "red on red" stack. They now own the hardware, operating system & application stack that must give them an integration advantage.

HP, focused years of engineering on systems management & lights out management & provisioning.

Dell, best known for their consumer logistics management they bring that skill to the business to business market & deliver a slick operation.

IBM, does it all & in case you like will even run the business for you.

Well there you have my view, for all it is worth. Choosing a seller is seldom easy-- let's not forget the importance of relationships & the necessity to trust the seller representative. I would only add that while making a wrong decision is reversible, making no decision is worse, because the proliferation of variation is a immense drain on resources, training & expense in knowledge centre management.