Slashdot Mirror
Intel Confirms Decline of Server Giants
An anonymous reader writes "A Wired article discusses the relative decline of Dell, HP, and IBM in the server market over the past few years. Whereas those three companies once provided 75% of Intel's server chip revenue, those revenues are now split between the big three and five other companies as well. Google is fifth on the list. 'It's the big web players that are moving away from the HPs and the Dells, and most of these same companies offer large "cloud" services that let other businesses run their operations without purchasing servers in the first place. To be sure, as the market shifts, HP, Dell, and IBM are working to reinvent themselves. Dell, for instance, launched a new business unit dedicated to building custom gear for the big web players — Dell Data Center Services — and all these outfits are now offering their own cloud services. But the tide is against them.'"
If Google sold servers, HP and Dell would die overnight.
Just the "12volt-only" power supplies with built-in batteries with "12volt-only" motherboards makes them more reliable than anything out there.
HP and Dell either can't or won't license this from Google.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Back in the day (say, 2008 as in the article), if you wanted to buy a server, you'd buy one from the big three.
These days, especially with FB and Google leading the way on commodity hardware, it's a different story.
So what should you get for your first server. I.e., you're a small company. You've got a couple of laptops. You're outgrowing mutual Samba.
You maybe want a fileserver. Maybe it'll have a few NICs and a virtual machine on it (Xen?) will do double duty as a external webserver.
So, Core i3, i5, Xeon? Number of processor cores? Forget fast drives, and just buy a lot of memory? Rack? Or tower?
Lockable front (so people can't just come by and reset it)? Hotplug harddrives? (You don't go this if you go the Google build-your-own route.) Redundant hard drives and ECC memory? Or a couple different commodity-style servers + sharding/rsync?
Is a big 3 server worth it? Or search for your own server case + server power supply, etc.?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Why bother with branded parts made by an ODM when you can buy directly from the ODM?
My old workplace had (has, probably) a fairly beefy Sun server with a whole bunch of disks. They used it as a RAID-based storage server for a bunch of lab data. As they do on occasion, a hard disk would crap out. The server wouldn't take ordinary disks, though: it would only accept Western Digital disks with some Sun ID code baked into the firmware -- rather than simply being able to buy a few WD RAID-friendly disks ahead of time, we had to jump through Sun's hoops to get disks replaced under warranty. This usually was a multi-week process, during the array with the failed disk was running with a hot spare -- hardly ideal. That was the last time we bought Sun systems.
At some other point, we were planning on setting up a few more storage servers for backup data. Dell's price for a storage system, including firmware-locked drives, was about triple the cost of doing it ourselves with SuperMicro servers, MD-based software RAID, and RAID-friendly disks. We ended up buying two of the SuperMicro-based systems and putting them in different buildings for semi-offsite backup (the concern was if the server room caught fire, not if a meteor affected the whole city). The only extra step during the setup was putting the disks in their caddies: the Dell systems came with the disks pre-installed. That took about 5 minutes per server. Whoop-dee-doo.
The Dell servers restricted our (with firmware-locked disks) options and cost substantially more than doing it in-house. We'd be stupid to go with their products, as we'd be locked to that vendor for the life of the servers.
Sure, we had Dell Optiplex systems as the desktop workstations for researchers as they were inexpensive, reliable in the lab, and essentially identical (useful for restoring system images from one computer to another), but their server stuff is stupidly overpriced.
The SuperMicro servers were much more "open" in that they used pretty bog-standard parts and didn't have stupid anti-features like firmware locking.
Let me get this right. Google, who builds all of their servers in-house, exclusively for their own use (not for resale), is the fifth largest buyer of Intel server chips in the world?
That sure paints a picture about the sheer size of Google's data center operations.
While yes, right now, the tide may be against the server manufacturers -- the cloud still requires them in large quantities to host those services. If it negatively impacts sales, it's only to the extent that efficiency is improved. (EG. Joe Businessman who once bought a server for his office of 10 employees skips it, in favor of cloud computing solutions. But it turns out his needs are small enough so they can share the load with 1-2 other small businesses like his, all on a single server in the cloud.)
In my opinion, Dell has the right idea -- changing the focus on who their customer is for their server products. Beyond that, what's really news here?
Going out on a bit more of a limb though? I'm really of the opinion that cloud services are over-hyped as the "in" thing for every business. Once companies migrate heavily to cloud hosted solutions and use them for a while, a fair number will conclude it's not really beneficial. Then you'll see a return to the business model of running in-house servers again. (Granted, those servers might be smaller, with lower power consumption than in the past. Little "microservers" handle many of the basic file and print sharing work companies used to relegate to full size rack mounted systems in the past.)
But my own experience with cloud migrations tells me that it's not so great, 9 times out of 10. For example, my boss has been using the Neat document management software for a while now to scan in all of his personal receipts and documents at home. Neat now offers "NeatCloud" so you can upload your whole database and then access your docs via an iPhone or iPad client, or even scan something new in by simply taking a picture of it. Sounds great, but in reality, he had nothing but problems with it. The initial upload tied up his PC for the better part of his weekend, only to report that some documents couldn't be converted or uploaded properly. He had close to 100 random pages of existing documents thrown in a new folder the software generated, to hold the problem ones. The only "fix" for this was to click to open a trouble ticket for EACH individual document that failed, so someone at Neat could examine it manually and correct whatever issue prevented their system from properly OCRing and uploading it. Clearly, that wasn't much of a solution! He tried, repeatedly, to get someone to remote control into his PC to do some sort of batch repair for him -- but after a couple promises to call back "the next day" to look at it, nobody ever did. Now, all Neat can tell him is they have another update patch coming out for the software in the next week, and to disable cloud uploads until that time.
Or take the recent migration a small office did from GoDaddy pop3/smtp email with Outlook to Google hosted mail. I usually help these guys with their computer issues but they thought they could tackle this migration on their own. Turns out, they wound up with a big mess of missing sub-folders of mail in Outlook on the owner's machine. After a lot of poking around, I discovered part of the problem was due to characters in the folder names that Google Apps didn't consider valid. When it hit one of those during the mail migration, it just skipped the whole mail folder upload with an error. (Did Google's migration wizard utility even warn about this in advance or offer to help rename the problem folders before continuing? Heck no!)
For that matter, take what you'd think is pretty basic functionality with cloud based data backup? I've run into multiple situation now where people used services like MozyPro for their backups, only to discover a full restore (when a drive crashed) was incredibly slow and kept aborting in the middle of the process, making the data restore essentially impossible. Mozy's solution? They're willing to burn a copy of the data onto optical disc and physically mail it back to you. So much for the whole cloud thing, huh?
Do they confirm it? Nothing's actually dieing until Netcraft says so.
see, I told you that electronic data processing was a fad
-- Spencer Tracy, "The Desk Set", 1957
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It may also depend on what kind of servers companies like Google want. Dell, HP and the like produce expensive servers with high-cost maintenance contracts, which look great to conventional business-executive types. Google, OTOH, probably is taking the techie approach of generic white-box servers with no support. They're installing their own OS image on it, and it's not going to be Windows or a commercial Unix, and with all Google's custom software they probably find vendor support all but useless. Ditto hardware support, the idea is to not worry too much about failures and just replace the box, and with generic hardware replacing failed parts is probably cheaper than the support contract would've been.
You've nailed the rest, though. When you depend on "The Cloud", you're depending on someone else to prioritize solving your problem. The problem is that the most effective solution for them is far from optimal for you, and you don't have enough leverage with them to change their priorities. At least when stuff is in-house the people responsible for it answer to you and you can, if needed, go down and rearrange their to-do list in person.
Google provides low-level cloud services (IaaS in the form of Google Compute Engine, PaaS in the form of Google App Engine, RDBMS-in-the-cloud in the form of Google Cloud SQL, bucket-style storage in Google Cloud Storage) as well as higher-level services (all of Google's various apps build on their cloud infrastructure.)
So the Google-Amazon distinction drawn in the parenthetical is inaccurate.
And everything to do with VMWare. No one is buying servers because they have no need to. When I can replace 400 physical boxes with a couple dozen ESX hosts why wouldn't I?
I guess another way you can look at it is Intel has innovated themselves out of a market. Multi-core procs have enabled the virtualization boom, but they didn't charge enough for them. At least the auto industry was smart about it - new cars last twice as long as cars from 15-20 years ago, and prices have gone up accordingly.