IT veterans don't often gush about new products, let alone cookie-cutter server boxes. But Matt Dattilo was clearly impressed with his new AMD servers when he and I spoke this week about PerkinElmer Inc.'s data center consolidation project, which involved a migration to virtual servers. Dattillo, vice president and CIO at the life sciences company, says he doesn't get nearly as much bang for the buck out of Intel-based servers as he does with his Opteron-based systems.

"Our new [servers] are AMD Opteron boxes. We're getting up to 30 virtual machines on one four-way Opteron and it's running at 25% utilization. It's untouchable. I've taken Intel's Woodcrest [processor] box and AMD knocks the socks off of it. Everything we're buying from here on out  is AMD."