@Levente re Carly
"Are you seriously saying you stopped buying HP because they fired the clueless PR lady?"
No, quite the opposite, sorry for any confusion - post-Fiorina meaning "after she arrived", rather than after she went...
When they put Carly Fiorina in charge I got yet another reason to not buy HP. Her likely long term impact on HP was clear based on the impact she'd had at previous outfits that had been foolish enough to put her at the top (AT+T/Lucent), as reinforced by what I saw of her early days at HP.
Shame really, because afaict from personal experience, and contrary to unsupported assertions here from other contributors (unhappy former CPQ customers maybe?????), a lot of Proliants are actually nice servers. Even the low end ones.
Don't take my word for it, ask the folks who actually buy servers, as reported by IDC. Pick any given quarter and Proliant will be the clear winner, likely closely followed by IBM (if you include their non-x86 servers), with Dell's servers getting less than half CPQ's Proliant revenue.
e.g. May 2010 report:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22360110
An ARM-based low end Proliant would be an interesting development in due course. Right now, there'll likely be a lot of x86-specific code for hardware initialisation etc in Proliant BIOSes, but the technology inherited from DEC made VGA BIOSes and the like work on non-x86 systems with Alpha CPUs so could presumably do the same in an ARM box, especially if it's in a server with restricted hardware options.
How much would that save end users on electricity and cooling?
Anyway, that's another topic.