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: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.

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.

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.