Well, in the midst of what I did at work this week, the only thing I did that was interesting to read about was finishing up work on an HP Proliant DL380. Meanwhile, the usual do-it-yourself crowd talks about building servers, just as it has been doing for the past few years, and as it will continue to do. And I remembered that, and thought about whether a DIY server would have been as easy to fix. In this case, there was no comparison.

If somebody else recommends IBM and he has reason to recommend IBM (such as recent experience with a recent product), then great. When I last worked on an IBM server, it was good equipment. But that was 5 years ago.

All of my dealings in the server room for the past five years, for one reason or another, have been with Compaq and HP equipment. Compaq’s server line became HP’s server line. So I’ve worked on a lot of HPs and haven’t had any bad experience with them–at least no bad experience that wasn’t quickly resolved. That’s why I recommend HP. Nothing against IBM or Dell. I just don’t know as much about their stuff.