I've had it with Dell. I'm sick of their crappy support and "take a ticket you dirty street urchin" approach to sales. Not to mention the sloppy reboot bugs on Redhat with Dell PowerEdges neither company seems to care about.

Can anyone comment on IBM for mid-high range server platforms for Linux (we use Redhat AS)? I would be very interested in negative and/or positive experiences. Although our corporate standard is with Dell, we have such huge agreements with IBM I think I could make a jump.

I used to support IBM server hardware until I changed jobs this summer. As far as the current models out there, here's my two cents:

xSeries 365 - This was brand new when I left IBM and it had a LOT of wierd problems. It took forever to boot and there were a lot of bugs with the BIOS, etc. This server had a lot of potential, but I was a little disappointed with it. I'm hoping IBM's worked out a lot of the problems on this server (which I'm sure they have). If IBM's fixed a lot of the issues with this box, it would make a very nice mid to high end machine.

xSeries 345 - This server's gone through some design changes, but overall it isn't a bad machine. It ran Linux rather well ( I tested it with several different Red Hat versions without any major trouble). The newer models out there now ought to be pretty solid.

xSeries 335 - Nice, little rack server. Dual CPU capable and is great for Linux Cluster compute nodes. It also makes a pretty good webserver.

xSeries 235 - This server has been around for about two years now and is still selling pretty strong. It's one of the more solid mid-range boxes out there. I ran one at my desk for over a year without any problems. This is an excellent, reliable mid-range server from my experiences with it. Also ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux very well.

eServer 325 - Opteron server. Had lots of problems with it...many of which were not fixed when I left. I'd be wary of this one. I hope the eServer 326 makes up for the problems in the 325.

xSeries 445 - This is the 32-way capable server. However, I don't think anything past 16 cpu's was very stable....again, that could have changed. If you're going to install AS 3 on this, I recommend using Update 2 or higher. This is a really nice server, but it can be pretty nasty to troubleshoot and work on.

The above are my opinions from my experiences with the servers. Someone else may have a totally different view on this. I hope this helps you out.

For mid-high range you should also look at IBM's pSeries servers based on their POWER5 chip. At the low end they aren't too expensive, but they are very fast. Also, you can have dynamic LPARs even with only 2 or 4 CPUs. That means you can run up to 10 separate OS instances on one CPU (like vmware, but firmware rather than software based so faster). You could buy a 2-way server and happily run 20 file/print servers on it. Also you can dynamically reallocate adapters, memory and CPU between these partitions.

See http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/ for more info. I've found them very reliable and with good support (IBM hardware engineers are great), but there is a significant price premium over Intel.

Thank you both for your feedback. It was indeed helpful.

Just in case anyone is interested, IBM took a shot at beating a bid on a Dell 6650 with quad 2.2Ghz 2MB Cache Xeon procs 8GB mem, Raid5 w/4x36GB disks.

They beat Dell only by around $1000 on a blind quote (not enough to inspire me to take a risk on a $15,000 order).

IBM proposed an x365 with the same attributes.

You might think that the $1000 isn't really insentive enough to make the switch but you are forgetting the big issue. The support. Like the hkb33 I work for IBM doing technical support for their ThinkPads. The server support team is 5 floors up from where I sit and I know almost all of them pretty well. These guys have been working support for IBM on almost all of their products for a minimum of 3 years before going to servers. They all know their stuff. I know I am biased because I work for IBM, but from a network admin who worked for a company that used all Dell, I would definately go with IBM. Something that may not seem related is the fact that IBM has sold off their PC and Mobiles production to a Chinese company named Lenovo. The reason for this is because IBM is going for strictly server production and enterprise solutions. This is huge. With all of IBMs resources consolidated into one area the support and engineering will only improve.

Again, however, I am biased.