Which blades should I buy? IBM/HP/Dell?

The following is a list of blade server manufacturers and what I see as their potential benefits, in the interests of being impartial, if I forget anyone, do let me know, it certainly wasn’t intentional, and it’s simply to illustrate what vendors are out their, that there are many options all with different products that might be right for you and your business.

• HP - I love the HP driver pack, the smartstart process, Systems Insight Manager is brilliant, and their documentation is very cool.
• IBM - the range of enclosures is simply stunning as is the connectivity and blade processor combinations avaialble, the different models/operating systems can all be managed in Director easily.
• Dell - does exactly what it says on the tin, driver support is good, expandability is fine and relatively inexpensive.
• Sun - their new range of blades, the x86 and sparc powered ones would be an excellent consolidation/virtualization platform and the drive support is also very cool.
• Hitachi - couple them up with their virtualization solution, and their storage and you have a rather good virtualization solution. I’d need to properly try their virtualization software though to be sure.
• Fujitsu - an excellent alternative to the others with great connectivity.
• Egenera - one of the early blade enterprises which offers a very cool virtualization solution, they continue to evolve their blades and their solution concept.
• Rackable - DC option remains fantastic, can run quite hot if necessary, the connectivity options you’d expect as standard.
• Verari - very interesting blade servers with energy efficiency being an important part of the solution, very cool.
• Panta Systems - an Oracle ‘in a box’ solution using blades, it does sound fantastic and ideal for your development or production oracle database systems.
• NEC blades - 6 blades in a 4u rack solution, PCI-X slot support, and hot plug drives, very cool.