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.

Comments

No they don't

[ArcadeMan]

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.

That's because those other people are stupid. They just need to put everything in the cloud!

Re:No they don't

[Ken_g6]

That kind of logic leads to everything running on some blackhat's machine.

well that's just silly

[roc97007]

Why don't providers just buy storage from the cloud?

Oh, wait.

Re:well that's just silly

[bobbied]

Provider one rents their servers from Provider 2. Provider 2 rents their servers from Provider 3. Provider 3 rents their servers from Provider 1.

We have a feedback loop and soon the cloud is a black hole!

I pretty much consider it a black hole already..

Re:Tongue twister title

[__aabppq7737]

A UNIX saleslady, Lenore, Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more. She found a good way To combine work and play: She sells C shells by the seashore http://www.indigo.org/humor/un...

Re:Tongue twister title

[gstoddart]

I think it should be written like:

Cloud. Boom.
Drives Sales. Boom.
For Physical servers. Boom.

Throw in some wikiwiki noises, a phat beat, and some sampling, and you've got a hit record.

Re:Not sure why this article was written

[CastrTroy]

What it really means is that it makes many have access to servers that never had them before. Before all these cloud servers showed up, if I wanted to have a place to backup my files to, I would buy another hard drive or backup to DVD. Which means I bought 0 servers. Now with cloud storage services, I just back my stuff up to the cloud. I'm using a certain percentage of a server.

A lot of things that require servers just didn't used to get done, because it wasn't feasible to buy your own personal server for yourself if you aren't going to utilize a significant portion of its resources. But with cloud services, even if you only need 1% of a server, you can still do that task because it's now possible to buy very small pieces of processing and network time.

Theory says more efficient utilization, but...

[michaelmalak]

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.

Re:Theory says more efficient utilization, but...

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Not quite. Theory says that the cloud is compelling when it reduces costs, however that might happen. More efficient use of hardware is a possible means of reducing costs. Putting the management of the physical servers in the hands of people who have superior technical chops for managing servers by the thousands is another. These mega-server farms are surely getting some advantages of scale, too, because the people writing the hardware checks have incentive to deliver value, where up front capital, reliability, and computing power are all carefully monitored factors. The reality is that cloud computing is delivering on some of its promise to reduce costs, thus demand is going up.

Re:Not sure why this article was written

[ShanghaiBill]

A lot of nontechnical people don't understand that "moving services to the cloud" is sometimes precisely moving services to someone else's servers in someone else's rack in someone else's datacenter(s).

I think everyone understands that. How else could it possibly work? The cloud vendors may not be perfect, but they likely have better reliability, better bandwidth, better backups, and better security than a "nontechnical" person could provide for themselves.

Traditional or white-box?

[ErichTheRed]

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?

Re:Not sure why this article was written

[Stan92057]

Problem is millions have been burned already. Their were tons of image storage/ Backup Storage sites that busted with the bubble long ago. Everyone looses everything when theses places go under with no way to get it back.So people are not dumb, we know a marketing catch word when we see it. They cant be trusted history has already proved that.

Re:Manager Alert!!!

[psergiu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement

Re:Not sure why this article was written

[The Grim Reefer]

I think everyone understands that. How else could it possibly work?

I think you give nontechnical people more credit than you should. I guarantee there are two people out there right now discussing what happens to their pictures if it rains. One of them probably has an MBA.

I hate reporting like this...

[Junta]

" HP wasn’t able keep up with its competitors. The company’s revenue share dropped from 25.5 percent to 23.8 percent, while its market share by volume dropped 2.6 percentage points to 20 percent, "

For anyone keeping score, this statement means 'HP is not keeping up because they are still in the lead, but the gap is narrower'.

"Dell increased revenue and shipments, but it too wasn’t quite able to keep up with the market. Its share of revenue and shipments each slipped by just under 1 percentage point to 17.1 percent and 19 percent respectively"

This is a little less blatantly wrong, but Dell is the #2 vendor Strictly true since they said keep up with *the market* which in aggregate grew, but being #2 in the market isn't such a dire thing.

" IBM had the third-largest server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems, while Lenovo was third by server shipments, "
This particular statistic is pretty screwed up because it doesn't correct for the situation that IBM sold of x86 based servers partway through the year in some parts of the world, and at the end of the year in other parts of the world. It mentions this, but fails to recognize that IBM's situation partially included Lenovo still. Lenovo's big year to year growth is mostly a changing of ownership currently.

"Cisco’s year-over-year server revenue growth of 44.4 percent was well above average for the industry, and suggests the company is not done capturing incremental market share in the server market"
Impressive and all, but given *after* that increase they still lag behind 4 other companies, it means that big year to year percentages are likely. Just like the lead experiencing a little crowding in a market shouldn't cause anyone to write them off, a large percentage gain by a relatively small player shouldn't send everyone into an excited state. You could write similarly exciting stories about some of the 'lower tier' vendors, but since those aren't exciting brands, they got omitted.

Re:Not sure why this article was written

[Dunbal]

but they likely have better reliability, better bandwidth, better backups, and better security than a "nontechnical" person could provide for themselves.

Another one who doesn't bother to read terms of service.

Re:We're still in the interval of Heroin Pricing..

[Krishnoid]

Also, heroin becomes twice as addictive every 18 months.

Re:Tongue twister title

[climb_no_fear]

In my day, we called cloud boom "thunder"