Then I could have read things like 'those fucking Sun boxes" and "that fucking HP cluster business".

paris, because she likes to fuck.

we benchmarked HP DL160 against a Dell Pe1950 and the whilst the CPU performance wasn't huge, the raid controller on the Dell beat the HP resoundingly; I haven't played with DL3xx since the G3 and G4 series. Therefore I think that TheReg's summary is misleading as it's very unclear what systems were actually tested at all.

With both sides being different shades of green?

Ouch, my brain hurts

First off, I'm biased my current employer has lots of Proliants. Second, I like the G5 DL series a lot. But HP's website has to be the most sluggish, poorly designed POS. Using it is a painful waste of time, particularly since they removed the configurator.

Who the survey surveyed? A CIO and most directors couldn't comment with any accuracy of what the iron is or how well it actually does. On another note. HP and IBM target these Einsteins of IT hard. Why? Purse strings. Sun does a bit and DELL? When was the last time anyone seen a Dell rep cold call? This report is very interesting for anyone who reads between the lines. HP and IBM FUD machines power of influence. I love the crap i hear from our HP rep how Sun is dead and Dell is crap. If you keep saying it people will start to believing it to be true.

Dell's RAID controllers are very good. AMI makes them, or did.

How did you read two pages and miss the entire subject? This is a review of a market survey. The graph shows customer perception of performance. The article says exactly where the numbers came from: 187 customers, 43% of which were SMBs (see the third paragraph for more detail).

Where did they get these figures from? IBM have the worst x86 support of any organization I have ever used. This month I have had a P1 call which took more than 14 days to resolve and I have a server with a fault which they still haven't fixed after six months.

Why are the bars in the graphs in reverse chronological order? It makes all the trends look in the opposite direction and is very misleading.

Let's see

1. IBM performance leader? Falling off my chair laughing....

For example, when were they last #1 in vmark performance for VMware environments? Dell obviously leads here in just about every category and has done for a long while now.

Dell largely leads in the measurements that most matter to customers: price-performance per watt, performance per watt.

2. Green leader? Dell again. Dell's leadership in price-performance per watt

3. Scientific survey? 187 customers is not a particularly scientific sample.

4. Customers speak with their dollars. Dell is growing servers market share faster than overall market. Are HP, IBM, Sun ?

5. Technology leader? Dell again. Compare Dell blades to IBM Blades and you'll see technology that actually saves customers money and reduces their ongoing management costs.

6. Sun's not even worth mentioning here - they have a microscopic X86 market share and fall under the other category with Supermicro and white box manufacturers.

7. Roadmaps? Remind me again how many times IBM has forced customers to update power supplies in their blades to accomodate new server formats. Bad planning, in comparison to HP, Dell who pre-designed blades to accomodate multiple generations of Intel and AMD chipsets.

CONCLUSION: article sucks.