These are my favorite hardware and software products that make life as a sysadmin easier.
(These are unsolicited recommendations - I don't receive any compensation for suggesting these products)
Hardware
Servers, Storage, etc.
- A10 Networks AX Series load balancers
- F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Managers
- HP Proliant BL series blade servers
- NetApp FAS series filers - SAN and multi-protocol NAS
- Penguin Computing - rock-solid servers with available Linux preload
- Sun x86 servers
- system76 - Desktops, laptops and servers with Ubuntu pre-installed
Tools and Data Center Items
- Ideal Industries - Great items such as crimpers and punchdown tools that are durable and easy to use. Mine have lasted for years!
- Panduit cable management solutions
Software
- Backtrack Linux - Pen testing, forensics and analysis tools galore
- Cacti - complete network graphing solution
- CentOS - Community ENTerprise Operating System. All the stability of Red Hat without having to pay through the nose for lousy support!
- IPPlan - great free PHP based IP address management solution
- Opsview - Nagios based enterprise monitoring solution
- Splunk - Splunk is a fully featured, powerful platform for collecting, searching, monitoring and analyzing machine data
- Ubuntu - The best of Debian-based Linux distros. Incredibly stable and well supported.
- VMware - Virtualization solutions for both servers and desktops. The leader in this area by far!
