Rack equipment vendor/thoughts on Dell?

[blu_discuss at seremeth.com (Steve S.)]

Hello,

I'm working for a startup and we are about to buy a lot of rackmount 
gear -- a little bit for our internal development, and a lot (15-20 
servers to start) to go into a local colo facility for 
staging/production type use.  We've been going back and forth on the 
different vendors.  I personally like HP, and have had decent luck with 
their DL series equipment - mostly 1-2U Intel based servers.  Dell seems 
to be a little less expensive and I can see a few minor reasons why 
there are plusses and minuses to purchasing their gear (example: Dell 
makes you pay extra for a PCI card that handles remote management where 
HP puts a port on the motherboard for that; dell includes a CD-ROM and 
HP makes you pay over $100 extra for one!).  Does anyone have any good 
reason we should NOT buy Dell gear?  I have priced out the equivalent 
machines with HP, Dell, Sun, along with local vendors like 
pcs4everyone.  All the equipment is in the same general ballpark per 
server class, but on high-end machines where cost is less of an issue 
than getting the fastest chips, the small vendors generally don't have 
access to the very latest technologies (example: pcsforeveryone doesn't 
have any dual-core Xeon chips in its line yet).

Any thoughts on vendors you like, don't like, reasons why?  I know this 
is a bit of an age-old-question, but I'm interested to here recent 
successes/failures.  All of this equipment will likely be running Linux 
(Perhaps CentOS, perhaps RedHat Enterprise, perhaps some flavor of vmware).

We'd rather have one vendor and try to keep the hardware as similar to 
each other as possible.

Thanks for any info -

Steve