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Cloud Boom Drives Sales Boom For Physical Servers
jfruh writes: The promise of the cloud is that your storage and computing problems will be abstracted away from messy physical objects that you need to maintain, taken care of far way by other people. Well, it turns out that those other people need to buy a lot of servers.
Theory says that the move to cloud should reduce global demand for servers since each individual company won't have to provide for its own compute & storage capacity overhead and can instead rely on both the "elasticity" and the efficient VM packing/balancing of the cloud.
The reality, however, is that the race to the cloud has cloud providers throwing money into cloud infrastructure and charging customers a pittance compared to the capital investment. This has corporate users of the cloud using more capacity than they otherwise would.
One thing to note is that "hyperscale public clouds" like Amazon, Microsoft and Google don't use off-the-rack HP, Lenovo or Dell hardware. They're using Open Compute Project-style designs contracted out to whitebox vendors. So, where's the demand for name brand servers coming from?
Even though we use virtualization extensively, everything is still in house. I wonder how much of a dent public cloud is actually making in corporate server infrastructure. Sure, some web startup supporting a phone app is a perfect use case for the cloud...but does it meet the needs of most companies?