Rack equipment vendor/thoughts on Dell?

[Bob BLU]

At 08:30 AM 1/26/2006, Steve S. wrote:
>... HP ... Dell ... Perhaps CentOS ...

If you will be installing the OS, versus buying pre-installed by the vendor you have some support issues to consider.  Mainly that you will be supporting the OS on the hardware, not the vendor.  This means that you will want to pay close attention to the vendor support site to see if there are any custom drivers or patches needed to make the OS and hardware work together.  Pick a model from each vendor and go review all the patches available from the hardware vendor, search the hardware vendors support forums, search redhat's knowledge base, search redhat's email list, google it, etc.  You may discover something important, or at a minimum you will be better prepared for the install.  You may also find that you like one vendors support site over anothers.

FWIW, I lean toward Dell and RHEL for customer systems.  I spec, configure, install and support these as part of application or systems integration solutions.  [If someone needs a local, independent, quality solution provider like this, contact me to start a conversation :-]