Slashdot Mirror
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
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"
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!
Sysadmins are worried about a lot more than how fast something is for development.
As a DevOps minded person who does code and understands hardware very well, Amazon and Rackspace are both a pile of garbage. They run on 4-year old Xeons that have been split 30 different ways. There are major IO contention issues. Snapshots take hours. SSDs cost thousands a month. They lock you into their service by using proprietary standards (e.g. RDS disables external replication). They come with little to no SLA.
Secondly, we've got privacy and security issues to worry about, regulations like HIPAA, PCI compliance, backups, redundancy, failover, documentation and continuity of business planning. We'll probably still be working for the company long after Amazon has gone out of business and the development team has been replaced or quit.
So, please, forgive your admin if he gets upset. A lot of us are in it for the long game and prefer not to shit all over our employer so they can continue to do business in the future.
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.
Over 92% of the coal consumed in the United States is used for generating electricity.
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/article/role_coal_us.cfm
Over 92% is almost 100%.
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?
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