They're All Clones

One thing that frustrates me most about purchasing servers is that all the major vendors are basically the same. Let's look at three of the largest: HP, Dell, and IBM. They all basically market the same systems, but with different names. You can make identical systems on each site and find Dell the cheapest, followed by IBM, followed by HP, but when you talk to the sales rep they all seem to come out the same. It's become a game of which sales rep I can convince to give me the best deal.

The hardware and software is all same as well, but they name it differently. Both HP and Dell have configuration assistant CDs that boot into linux and use a full-screen Mozilla variant, and their management software and Lights-Out Managers are basically the same too.

The vendors all claim that the price differentials you would see is due to optimizations such as custom hard-drive firmware. How that justifies a doubling in price over generic hardware isn't clear to me. Shouldn't we all have learned from Google that off-the-shelf hardware is a cost-effective performance solution if you have the expertise to make it work?

At least Sun differentiates themselves by reducing interoperability and using more proprietary components, though functionally I haven't seen much of a difference.

All of this doesn't matter that much to me as I shop mostly for hardware. Home-grown linux installs aren't too picky about service contracts. At least I get to play the salesmen off each other to get cut-rate prices. When vendors compete to sell the same products to a fixed pool of individuals the customer always wins.