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In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All the Servers Will Ship To Cloud Providers
dcblogs writes "IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift is slowing the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. The increased use of SaaS is a major reason for the market shift, but so is virtualization to increase server capacity. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well, along with the purchase of denser servers capable of handling larger loads. The increased use of cloud-based providers is roiling the server market, and is expected to help send server revenue down 3.5% this year, according to IDC."
It pours!
Holy crap, are we coming up on 2014 already?
God damn do I suddenly feel old.
In a three years, nearly everyone will send their own data to the NSA without even having to be asked!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
...the cloud market might as well implode, like any bubble in making.
and thanks to the NSA ...0 percent will be hosted near any friend of the nsa
[I am a developer not an admin]
It takes us weeks to months to get a new server provisioned and ready for use where I work. We did a MAJOR project years ago with the promise that it would take less than half an hour to do so, but that is never the reality. They put in huge servers with virtualization, a SAN, and everything else they asked for to do this, but they just don't. It has turned our workplace into slow IT because of admins not because of development. We can develop a solution in days and then take months to deploy.
Now we can within an hour have our server set up in Rackspace, have our network admin make a firewall rule for it and it is all set up within the day. Our admins are making themselves irrelevent and they don't even realize what they are doing.
BTW, I am 100% against using "the cloud", but am having a very difficult time justifing that position with what I see on a daily basis.
Almost 100% of all coal is shipped to electricity providers. Reliability and Economies of Scale.
Although most people don't care about spying activities at all, many managers have stopped or at least paused cloud projects here in Germany during the last months/weeks.
I'm really disappointed by the political reaction against the NSA activities - from both, politicians as well as citizens. But as soon as it affects business, people seem to care. So at least there's attention on a business level. And this affects small companies as well as big ones. Most companies are afraid of industrial espionage in the sense of losing their intellectual property to their competitors. Others are even forced to stop cloud projects from regulatory authorities, because they would infringe privacy laws.
So cloud projects are currently possible only with non-US-based providers.
That agenda is pushing dumbass CIOs into making bad decisions. Cloud Services, Co-Lo Hosting and the services wrapped around them are good tools to have at your disposal but like any tool if you don't know how to use them you can leave your organization high and dry. IDC and Gartner have a vested interest in selling Cloud and their associated third party service vendors to businesses since they're market makers. They're no different that your stock broker calling you up trying to sell a stock that's on their "hot sheets" to drive revenue. Companies pay these idiots for their "research" which is usually some guy sitting down and reading Internet articles and going to conferences where they hear long sales pitches from CSC, Rackspace and Amazon. None of this replaces a good set of people and an Enterprise Architecture strategy that the organization needs to develop and own.
What IDC misses here is two of the big cloud players, Google and Amazon, are growing their own servers so IDC's true "insight" should be that HP, Dell and IBM are going to lose server revenue more not from larger bulk deals with cloud providers but the fact that the bigger players are just going to buy components. Also companies aren't writing blank checks to their IT organization anymore. This means those big budget projects where you roll in racks of servers will be pushed more and more to virtualization. There's also the aspect that there are a lot of businesses who will never let their data or their customers data fall into the hands of any third party, even a hosting provider and they will still need servers and disk and products because year after year their existing footprint gets older and you need more capacity and to refresh your infrastructure.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Where some PHB does the buying of your cloud system so you can be stuck with low end systems, small bandwidth , small web space and so on as the PHB picked bob's cheap cloud space.
One thing that /. readers often fail to take into consideration is that many companies may find that it's easier to outsource to a company with a solid reputation for hiring good people than to try to hire good people on its own. For smaller companies in particular, there's a hiring bootstrap problem here. They have to hire the right people who will be able to identify the candidates to build a solid IT team. A lot can go wrong, and many companies may in fact benefit from outsourcing to a reputable company who they can sue the hell out of if there is an issue and a highly paid consultant can point the finger at them cutting corners to make a few extra bucks.
If you don't have "Cloud Provider" in your services portfolio, you're like, so totally last century. Nobody provides server hosting or IT services these days. Everyone does cloud, man. The same old IT department at your employer is now a Cloud Provider.
If you have a server in your mom's basement . . . congratulations, you are a cloud provider!
It's all so everyone can claim that they are doing Cloud.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are two items at play here...
1) Server consolidation - when I was at AMD a few years ago, I saw a series of roadmaps showing the predicted consolidation based on hypervisors 300 servers to 30. The immediate thought that went through my mind is "the cost of enterprise CPUs" need to go up otherwise there will be blood in chip market. Servers were the cash cow for the market.
2) Migration to cloud - this is really consolidation mk II. Move to the cloud and rely on focused efforts to migrate, load balance, spin up and spin down services. All with the economy of scale that large datacenters provide. This has hit the OEM manufacturers (HP, Dell, etc) since the larger players in the market can go direct to China with the volumes they need and
Ultimately it is a question of reducing unused capacity. According to some stats (google "datacenter utilization"), 1st party utilization is around 5-10%, cloud utilization is around 20-30%. The two items above really deliver a 1-2 punch to the Server and Chip industry.
A basic SANS can be installed (depending on size). The larger the SAN the longer it takes to ensure the environment is correct: proper wiring, AC, power conditioning+UPS, failover testing,...
And repeat for the server.
In both cases, a testing period is required to identify early failures (shipping a lot of disks almost guarantees a few will fail immediately, others will fail in a week). Sometimes even the power supply fails and needs replacement.
This is the same with "the cloud"... the only difference is you are assuming the "cloud" provider has ALREADY DONE THE WORK.
You still pay for it, either way. Cloud bills continue forever. Local install overheads (wiring, AC, UPS) only occur during installation. In both cases, you still pay for maintenance. With the cloud provider you continually pay for installation...
No company should trust "company proprietary" to a cloud provider. Once it is in the control of the provider, it is no longer "company proprietary" - it belongs to the provider, and you only have access to it based on the contract you signed...
You also have also added another point of failure (the ISP) in access to the data.
No longer be in control of their data?
See, if they spy on Americans, they could get in trouble. See, as an intelligence agency, there are limits on what they can do wrt Americans, and if you ahve an American server and an American person of interest, then you have to do a bunch of paper work and go to a secret court and it's just a big pain in the ass.
BUT if you ship everything overseas, then it's fully within plausible deniability in harvesting all of the information from a source controlled by a foreign national. Once it goes off shore, the drag net gets to sift through everything. The NSA's mission is to sift through every scrap of data they can get ahold of. The only people who would want non-American servers are non-Americans, because they have no protections whatsoever. Americans *should* want American servers as there's a whole judicial process involved once everything is under US jurisdiction. That won't stop the NSA from "accidentally" combing though your stuff, but if they screw up even a little bit then a good lawyer can have it all thrown out.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm so sick of "the cloud the cloud the cloud." Everything is a freaking cloud now. It's stupid marketing horseshit and that's all there is to it. When I'm doing a consultation for a business and they ask me about "storing things in the cloud," the first thing I do is tell them what that word really means.
"The cloud" just means you're putting all of that data on hard drives owned someone else you don't know.
When I change the context this way, businesses suddenly start to think twice. I also like to point out that Dropbox has been found to open your documents for some unknown reason as a recent example to show that you don't know who is going through your stuff when you push it off onto another person's computer. Then I bring up the point that if law enforcement decides it wants to look at your data for whatever reason, you have less control over that because it's stored on someone else's systems and the warrant or subpoena could potentially go to that provider instead of you. Then there's the fun part when a cloud provider makes a mistake and accidentally gives your account to someone else you collaborated with, or deletes your account without a trace or any notice. Don't even start on the NSA end of this mess. Trusting "the cloud" is a stupid idea.
Most companies don't like the idea that when they move their data into "the cloud" when the possible repercussions are put into perspective and the marketing gimmick is stripped away.
Just yesterday I turned up a new "cloud" based service per corporate directive.
Holy crap what a mess! Granted, I don't have to deal with any hardware and the project was completed in 5 hours. But, what a convoluted and mind numbingly complex series of integrations and cross connections.
Project: A PHP site/app for mass-mailing and list management through AWS.
I have 9(!) new and unique userIDs and passwords for setup and administration. IDs for service providers, servers, applications...
I have no clue where anything is physically located.
I have no idea how secure it actually is because I have no idea what or how many systems it all uses and how well they are secured.
It will be a nightmare to troubleshoot this beast if it stops working!
There is a lot of opportunity for service interruption due to billing issues at any of the numerous different services. Domain, DNS, Hosting, App subscription, AWS...
I could re-implement this entire mess on a single LAMP server(provided a big enough pipe) in an hour, post OS install.
the only difference is you are assuming the "cloud" provider has ALREADY DONE THE WORK.
You're not 'assuming' it, you've written it into the contract in the form of SLAs. In most organizations I've worked with, there are rarely SLAs between IT and the departments they support, or, if there is, they are ignored. Not the case with an SLA between a cloud provider and an organization.
Let's be honest. SLAs are not panacea. SLA's are written excuses and liability limitations for providers. They provide no real guarantee nor do they benefit the consumer in anyway.
SLA: We, the provider, guarantee to provide X service within 3 hours. Should we fail to provide X service within said time, you the consumer, will not be billed fro the 3 hours during which service was not provided. Guaranteed!
So, you won;t charge me for the service you failed to provide me? That's dandy! How much does that SLA help my business when Verizon won't repair my connection for 3 days? How much benefit has the SLA provided when AWS has a cascading failure that shuts my IT services down for days on end or slows my sales to @% of normal while also angering my customers? Woohoo, they won't charge me for 3 days this month!
Interorg or departmental SLAs are even more ludicrous. But nitwitted middle managers and PHBs(which are you?) can use them as an excuse to avoid blame, so SLAs still get trotted out as if a SLA had any real value with regard to uptime or delivery schedules.
Do they count your own cloud like my synology server too?
It's one of the best ways to avoid NSA.
There is absolutely no way all servers could be moved to the Internet. Should I work DHCP, DNS, Active Directory,Backups, Local file shares, and all other basic infrastructure to the cloud? Even when the ISPs here in upstate backwater NY are down for every snowstorm? Sorry, no work today... the Internet is down.
Sure, "nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers". This says nothing about general purpose computers that just happen to be used as servers (such as is often done with Raspberry Pis, random desktops etc), or used servers. Given that computers arn't getting better that much faster, and home server requirements arn't growing as a huge rate, I'm not at all surprised or worried that people who care about privacy won't be buying so many brand new servers (only 55% of them? That seems like a ton to me...)
My brand new home server is on the way here. Its not marked as a server, so it does not count in these stats. I hope the NSA likes my using Tor hidden services as a way to deal with my dynamic IP and NAT routing problems :)
There's just no way to satify you people, is there?
I thought they meant In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All Servers Will be Obtained from Bankrupt Cloud Providers.
So if you hold on to your existing autonomous infrastructure today... in three years you will be able to upgrade your server very cheaply!
If we can convince everyone to hold on to their existing autonomous infrastructure starting right now... we won't even have to wait three years! Those sad little cloud service pound puppies will start hitting the market in months.
In light of this I have decided to hold on to my own autonomous infrastructure for one more day. Now it's your turn.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
GOOD ONE. But it's already too late. The last of the content disappeared years ago. Everything is being served from Squid proxies. If you don't believe me check the Last-Modified time on this page. See how it is, like, this very minute? That means there is a coverup in progress.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Internet is like fire - useful AND dangerous.
"The cloud" is the white fluffy harmless icon on the network diagrams that some marketing guy probably did a Ted Stevens and became inspired by it. Marketing and people not thinking get us to where we are today.
If fire was discovered today, we'd have created many safe sounding names for it that would result in more fire damage.
What marketing speak would you use for fire?
...the cloud market might as well implode, like any bubble in making.
AND IT'S GONE!
[dancing banana]
[dancing banana]
[dancing banana]
Out of curiosity, does somebody already offer a service where you can put your Windows Shares and even Domain Controller to cloud? Then you would use them transparently and users could also log in to them at home. Is this possible?
Uh, Yea. That's partially what this whole cloud thing is about.
Users have been able to login to the network, servers(RDP/Citrix), workstations(PCAnywhere - GoToMyPC) since ~1994. The servers can be located as physical machines in any datacenter or, as cloudy virtual machines on Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, and a thousand other VM/VPS providers.
Some service providers, including Microsoft Azure, offer the discreet services(e.g. AD, Sharepoint, Exchange) without any hardware or VM or OS management. You just buy metered Active Directory Service.
100% of all servers will ship to companies whose executives have used the "cloud" buzzword to promote the company.
just a ghost in the machine.
Google, Facebook, Amazon and I assume alot of other Cloud SP's are building much of their own hardware today.
Facebook has published the Open Compute Initiative specs they use.
So it would be interesting to know the "real" number of servers being deployed per year in 3-5 years.
I think people "like the impression of ownership" not simply because it's some sort of quirk of human nature, but because it equals control of what's owned. If you think about it though, when it comes to most things of large value - we don't really own what we say we own. A lender does.
I don't know very many people in the U.S. who own their homes, free and clear. Most people I know with relatively nice cars have a loan on them, too.
So why would we be so eager to make those arrangements? Well, there's still the promise that at the end, when all the payments are complete, it truly becomes yours. And just as importantly, as long as you pay on time, nobody ELSE out there has any say so or ability to borrow/use what you're paying for.
That's my problem with a lot of these cloud based services. They offer a number of benefits, but you give up some control in order to use them. I think some people are so used to payment arrangements as part of a purchase, they feel like they're still in control of what they put in the cloud. "I get my very own unique username and password, and I can log in and do whatever I like with the service at any time as long as I keep making my payments on time!" Problem is, there's no end to those payments when the service becomes "yours". You're just a renter of the service, and the law isn't even very clear as to what the "landlord" is obligated to do with your data if you're evicted from the system.
Better headline: IDC expects current trend to continue, extrapolates linearily despite thousands of years of evidence that few things scale in a linear fashion.
Like all trends in tech, this hype will hit a saturation somewhere and then something else is hot. We've seen this a dozen times before, why do we always look at the newest trend as if we're newborns seing the sun for the first time?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
this is really bad guys, menu icons only have an outline; you have to mouse over them for them to appear, a bunch of graphic garbage is stuck to the top of the screen and won't budge, the error list has about 5,000 "unknown property" errors in it, but worst of all, it looks like windows 8
Our uptime is guaranteed; we are required to adhere to certain maintenance windows. If we don't, customers can (and have) penalized us. It's in the SLA - That's our "service level."
Ooh! Your uptime is guaranteed by an SLA! That sounds so impressive! So how come you didn't post a link to the SLA?
What happens when you have/had an outage? What "penalty" does the customer exert? Do you pay them for lost business? Do you pay for them to spin up a DR/BC site? Or do you simply not bill them for the downtime?
'XYZ Corp guarantees 100% up time and if we're ever down we won't charge you for the promised service we fail to deliver and you relinquish any right to sue us for lost business of any kind.'
This is typical SLA language. This is not an SLA of ANY benefit or value to the customer of your service.
Seriously Linux was taking over, then Apple was taking over. I hardly ever see a serious game changing IDC prediction that pans out. Oddly enough back in 2000 and maybe earlier I heard execs from Sun saying the network is the computer. Cloud is just a few companies trying to claim this is a new idea rather than the latest push to let others own your data. To ensure it works they have spent the last 10 plus years convincing everyone that privacy is dead and not required.
Nah, they won't really go bankrupt, they'll just use all their servers to mine bitcoins, once they hear that Gartner or IDC expects bitcoin to be at $11.7k in three years.
I prefer to use the term "distributed external hosting." That's usually what people are referring to.
Does it mean that 45% of all servers will be used to heat up water ? Or maybe something about weather forecasts.
Put your data in the clown! Clown storage! Clown backup! Print your spreadsheets out and tape them to the windows facing out - your data is in the clown! Clown docs! Clown plus! Clown docs plus! Clown clown clown!
"Okay... but will it save me money?"
YES! You save money because all the IT guys in charge of your data aren't your employees! You're not paying them a dime! They work for me! Hahahaha!
"Hmm.. I think our shareholders will like this. Is it safe?
SAFE??! Hahahahahahaaaaa... YES! Trust me! I'm a company! Sign the lease! Sign right there! Come on! SIGN IT! Honkhonkhonkhonkhonkhonk!