Can I mention brand names and their products in my research/technical paper?
I don't know about hardware, but in case you feel like mentioning some software (and hardware often comes with software...), beware that the EULA can prohibit researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers. 

Oracle is notorious for that, they sued David DeWitt following some benchmarks he had published that mentioned Oracle, see the DeWitt Clause. Luckily the University of Wisconsin supported him, but Oracle banned all Wisconsin alumni for a while.