Hi Julie,
Where are you locating your equipment? Is it your own data centre, which you are building fresh, re-using existing facilities you have or collocating in someone else’s relatively new facility?
All of the above will factor in to your decision - space is generally not a problem for data centres now and is of negligible cost. However, power and cooling is the killer. For example, if you fill a rack full of blades/ servers, how are you gaining the power and cooling density?
In respect of your choice of manufacturer, Sun and Dell obviously have very different offerings. I would suggest that you get both vendors to supply you with hardware, and actual run some performance tests. Depending on which model of Sun's you go for and your application behaviour, you may find that they have a slower processor speed, but due to the density of cores, and memory bandwidth available your application will perform faster for example.
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