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.'"

Comments

If Google sold servers...

[denis-The-menace]

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.

Re:If Google sold servers...

[fm6]

Sorry, you're wrong. Wish you were right.

I've always been appalled by the way PCs rely on big, hot, wasteful noisy internal power supplies. When IBM entered the workstation market, 30 years ago (Oh, Lord, that makes me feel old) I worked for a company that made a pre-PC x86 system that relied entirely on external, passively cooled power supplies. To me, this was clearly the way of the future, but once IBM entered the market, everything had to be IBM compatible, even the way the power system worked. Because if you couldn't use IBM-compatible power supplies, your system cost too much to build. (I once had to throw out a perfectly good Zenith PC with a blown PS; although it was mostly IBM-compatible, its power supply was proprietary, and cost too much to replace.)

So, Google can't go into the hardware business, because their machines would cost too much and would rely too much on proprietary infrastructure. Easier to justify using your own technology regardless of cost when you're gigantic and profitable.

HP and Dell's nightmare isn't Google. It's cloud computing in general. The cloud providers (which includes Google, if you ignore the fact that they only provide high-level cloud services, unlike Amazon) mostly build their own hardware. Those that don't buy cheap no-name hardware.

No surprise.

[heypete]

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.

Re:Your first server, in 2012

[MightyMartian]

As much as anything, I think virtualization is murdering the market. I bought a $3000 server that hosts six VM guests; two Windows installs (one a DC, one an Exchange server) and four Linux. A couple of years ago, I would have needed at least three servers to do it (one for each Windows install) and one Linux. Admittedly they wouldn't have to have the balls that the new server has, but still, I think we'd be talking about $4000 to $6000 in hardware. Even worse, these are all just basically images sitting on hard drives, so they can essentially be perpetual. Two or three years, when the current server dies or I decide I need more juice, just move the VM images over and away I go, and with hardware prices the way they are, I doubt the next generation server will cost any more than the one I have now, and maybe even less.

Factor in the cloud, VPS hosting and so on, the demand for servers will inevitably drop.

Re:Your first server, in 2012

[h4rr4r]

Linux software raid is great.
Proprietary software raid is garbage.

I base this on what I have seen. Linux software raid beats cheapy hardware controllers both in reliability and speed.