Quoting Brian Densmore [email protected]:
Compaq servers can also be purchased with Linux on them right?
Have worked on half a dozen Compaq servers over the years, I rate them Gateway Servers and that is not very highly. During the era when I was working with Compaq hardware, everything was proprietary. If a drive failed or a stick of RAM failed, they had to be replaced with Compaq parts. And those parts failed on a regular basis.
I worked in an HP shop for a little over a year and their equipment was outstanding. Service was awesome. I was extremely disappointed when Compaq and HP merged, fearing that HP would be brought down to Compaq's level.
I've been working on Dell hardware at work, exclusively for the last six years and have been extremely pleased with it. I was running Linux on hardware from Dell before they supported it with very little problems.
In our racks we have almost a dozen Dell servers running RHELAS with no issues whatsoever. In our development environment, we have seven Dell boxes running some version or another of Red Hat or Suse. Some of these boxes are approved by Dell to run Linux, others aren't and all of them work without any problems at all.
As for service from Dell, I've never had any bad experiences (knock on wood), so far. I've had two disks fail in the last couple of years and they have been replaced in short order.
If you're looking to run Linux on server hardware, Dell is rock solid.
-- Dave Hull http://insipid.com