Customers who build out datacenters using x86 servers typically call it like they see it. They"ll say they"re saving money by avoiding proprietary platforms in favor of high-performance, low-cost commodity hardware. But don"t use the C-word around major server vendors. As anyone from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems will tell you, the CPUs may be the same, but not every x86 server is created equal.

Dell prefers to call its hardware "industry-standard servers." Sure, they"re Intel inside, but the processor isn"t everything. As the volume leader in x86 servers for the U.S. market, Dell prides itself on being able to give its customers all the latest standard technologies before its competitors can.

"We were first to market with PCI Express and DDR-2 memory interfaces, for example," says Neil Hand, vice president of worldwide enterprise marketing at Dell. "The really important thing from a customer perspective is that new technology is great, but only when it can be deployed fast enough to give them business value."

Sun also sees engineering as a key differentiator for its own x86 servers. Working under Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the company"s engineers labored to build many of the same features customers expect from Sun Sparc systems into the new, AMD Opteron-powered Galaxy line.

"We"ve designed into them the capabilities that you"d expect for high reliability, high resilience," says Graham Lovell, senior director of x64 servers at Sun. "The most unreliable part of any computer is anything that spins; so it"s disk drives, fans, and things like that. We"ve made all of those accessible without stripping the machine down, and we"ve made all of them redundant. You can essentially have a failure in any of the moving components and replace them while the machine"s running."

Overall power consumption, accessibility of components, manageability, and effective rack density are among the many other features that differentiate one server from the next, and vendors compete aggressively in all of these areas. So when you"re in the market for new equipment, choose wisely. The stickers on the boxes may be the same, but the details inside each server make all the difference.