IT Jungle published an interesting article today that ranks the big X64 server vendors — Dell, IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems — based on user surveys conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). They use a metric called Vendor Preference Index (VPI) in order to eliminate respondent bias. Dan Olds, the founder of GCG and the article’s author, explains it thusly:

The VPI compares the number of “votes” a vendor gets to the number of respondents who said they have standardized on that vendor. … A score of 100 on any given question is par, meaning that the same number of customers who have standardized on a particular system also “voted” for that vendor on that question. A score significantly under 100 is not so good, because it means customers who have standardized on systems from one vendor voted for another vendor. A score significantly over 100 is, of course, great.

Overall, IBM and HP came out on top, followed by Sun, then Dell. The entire article is here.