The envelope, please. The 2012 PilotHouse Award winner for Servers for Virtualization is…”

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Guest blog written by Doug Strain, HP Industry Standard Servers

OK, so the PilotHouse Awards aren’t as well known as the Oscars or the Grammies - and I’m guessing that they aren’t hot topics at cocktail parties, but, if you’re responsible for delivering IT to your organization, you just might want to get familiar with them.

PilotHouse Awards are recognition from  Nemertes Research, who issues the awards for critical topics of interest within IT.

So who won this year’s prestigious PilotHouse Award for Servers for Virtualization, you ask?

HP! Of course,  this should hardly be a surprise, since according to major analysts; HP sells more servers than any other company on the market. And this is after all a repeat performance—HP also picked up this award last year, too. Is this a start of a trend?  We at HP sure hope so.  But the winner of the award is just the headline. You should really take a look through the entire report, which can be found on HP’s web site.

There’s really some insightful information worth checking out. First, the award is based 100% on feedback from actual users of host servers - and there are some great customer quotes to back up the data. Second, this report can help you gauge what is important to your peers, and how your peers rate different vendors among various dimensions including Technology, Customer Service, and Value.

It also shouldn’t be a surprise that HP is in first place by a wide margin on the Technology metrics since technology has defined HP’s servers and HP has blazed trails in server technology in areas such as HP BladeSystem, Virtual Connect, and management software.

It may be less common for people to think of HP first for either Customer Service or Value but in fact, HP ranks among the top for both of these metrics, too. HP’s biggest area of improvement since winning last year was Customer Service. The supporting quote, citing a “Director of IT in a large financial-services firm,” is (using the emphasis from the report): “They have been very aggressive in the past year. They have been animals on service and support.” I think in this case, it’s good to be an animal.

Since virtualization blurs the line between physical and virtual servers, HP has really developed its ability to offer seamless support between the ProLiant server hardware and the virtualization layers from major virtualization vendors. This support is bundled in with HP’s OEM versions of VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and is optional for Hyper-V.

Value may come as the other big surprise. As the report states, “Users are, again, nearly universal in rating HP’s value high. Not that they haven’t noticed that they often pay a bit of a premium for the servers, more that they are so happy with the reliability of them that the premium is seen as entirely justified (for now, at least).” And now with ProLiant Gen8 on the street, the value proposition gets even better.

But don’t take my word for all of this. Download a free copy of Nemertes’ report on HP’s web site and read the award news for yourself.  NOTE - this report, normally available only to Nemertes paid subscribers, it is being made available to you at no additional cost, so be sure to check it out!