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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."
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
[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.
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"
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!
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.
I'd like to know what your reasoning is? I think we are simply witnessing the movement of certain base-level IT services into the commodity space. This has happened in many other industries once they become mature. For instance, unless you have some critical, unique, proprietary capability, you probably farm out your manufacturing. Why have capital equipment and specialized employees unless they are going to be utilized 100% of the time? A well-run contract manufacturer will be doing just that. The same thing is happening with IT. Why run in-house email or public-facing services? If the internet is down, you won't be getting email anyway, and no one will be able to see your web page. If you have multiple locations or telecommuting employees, you are already at the mercy of internet speeds and availability. Certain services are mature, and unless you have some specialized need "the cloud" works just as well or better than your in-house solution.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Although I don't proclaim to be able to predict what will actually happen in the future. I the past in the computer industry has bounced between server "cloud" centric and client centric for years. There are advantages in having both, In your example of email while it is true you can't get new email while the internet is down you can still read old emails. If the emails where stored only on the server then this would be inconvenient. Also there is a difference your connection to the internet going down and your email cloud provider going down. It is one more point of failure.
Also don't underestimate the value of having control over your data, you do not want to be reliant on some random person/company being up, not go bankrupt, or change its terms and conditions on you. Also people like having the impression of ownership, I think its something inherent in our nature, how many things do you own that you use only use occasionally, that would much be a much better allocation of resources if it was shared?
Why write the SLA on paper when you can store it in the cloud?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Cloud SLA's are not worth the paper they aren't written on.
I work for a SaaS company. Our customers hold us strongly to the SLAs. If your providers aren't, then you need a different provider, better lawyers, or both.
Reasoning? The mainframe is a "cloud in a box". We are almost up to 1970. The mainframe died. The "private cloud" (think 1989 Citrix) has seen its growth and decline.
We host, we insource, we host again, and repeat. Rather than the challenge of "why will this one fail like all others before it have" ask the question the other way, "why do we think this one will be permanent, when all others before it failed?"
Learn to love Alaska
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>
Sooner or later, companies will realize that they can save money by taking back ownership of their IT infastructure. It's simply a cycle very much in the tradition of pre-Abrahamic societies that viewed life in general as a never ending cycle.
Corporate beaurocrats need to re-arrange the deck chairs in order to make it look like they are doing something productive. Sooner or later, they will change things even if there isn't any real reason to.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The cloud isn't technological. There are a few enabling technologies like virtualisation, but the cloud itsself is a business model. It's just a new, upmarket term for 'outsourcing to a specialist contractor.'
I'm more cynical: I believe that the vast majority of people couldn't care one bit about internet privacy until it affects them personally and directly. The only people using mesh networking and encrypted p2p are pirates and enthusiastic activists.
Also don't underestimate the value of having control over your data, you do not want to be reliant on some random person/company being up, not go bankrupt, or change its terms and conditions on you.
On the Ts & Cs, you have a point, but for the rest of it, I ran my own mail server for years. My uptime never came close to matching gmail, and I'm far more likely to go bankrupt than Google or Amazon. Gmail's spam filtering is better than anything I ever achieved, too.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.