I'm curious about other's experience with the 3 major x86 hardware vendors and running Linux on them. I work for a large company and we require remote console access on all systems. I mention this as the remote console has been a major pain for some of the systems we have tested.

So, I was hoping there were more of you out there who had gone through this before and picked a favorite vendor. I'm leaning towards a certain one, but I don't want to skew the replies

BTW, the three vendors we've considered were HP, IBM, and Dell

IBM by far outperforms the other two vendors you mentioned. Especially when it comes to remote access and console. I currently work in an environment mixed with HP and IBM, the IBM's are much more preferred with quality, ease of use, upgrades, cost, etc. We are slowly phasing all of the HP hardware out and only have IBM and SAN storage as the previous VP and Sysadmins for some reason decided to use large bulky 4U HP boxes with direct attached SCSI storageworks which really doesnt work in today's environment, well, without taking up lots of room, etc.

As for Dell's, stick with them with Desktop machines, it's what they do best. I wouldn't buy Dell servers even if they were the only vendor left that prebuilt them for sale, I'd be building homegrown machines then..

sounds fair.

we've actually seen the opposite. our IBM x366 and x460 hardware has been nothing but a nightmare for us so far. And the RSA has not been very reliable either. It often messes up at install time, and it doesn't recognize my keystrokes or it just freezes or something. HP's haven't ever done that to me. And I haven't really worked with the Dell's that much. We have some racked up, but I've been too busy to mess with them much. They are still running without a problem as far as I can tell though.