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Cloud Hardware

In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All the Servers Will Ship To Cloud Providers 152

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."
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In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All the Servers Will Ship To Cloud Providers

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  • by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @10:26AM (#45632745)
    In a three years, nearly everyone will send their own data to the NSA without even having to be asked!
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So what. Do you have something to hide?

      • If you have nothing to hide, why post Anonymous Coward, that just show YOU have something to hide...
        • Just because someone posts as "Anonymous Coward" don't mean they have something to hide. They may simply not want to open a slashdot account.

          Anyway I assume AC was simply making a joke.

      • So what. Do you have something to hide?

        Would you also accept the following deal: the NSA would have your home key and they could walk in any time and look at various objects?

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        If you think you don't, then you are just kidding yourself.

        Our Constitution evolved in a context that includes things that could be described as "historical abuses" and is thus something that few modern Americans have any ability to relate to.

        Human nature doesn't change all that much really.

    • No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
      • No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!

        GOOD ONE. But it's already too late. The last of the content disappeared years ago. Everything is being served from Squid proxies. If you don't believe me check the Last-Modified time on this page. See how it is, like, this very minute? That means there is a coverup in progress.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    [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 t

    • Where some PHB does the buying of your cloud system so you can be stuck with low end systems, small bandwidth , small web space and so on as the PHB picked bob's cheap cloud space.

    • by Oceanplexian ( 807998 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @11:14AM (#45633083) Homepage
      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.
       
      • by dkf ( 304284 )

        SSDs cost thousands a month.

        If you're hiring that sort of service on the Cloud for months at a time, you're doing it wrong. The USP of the Cloud is very short hire times, say a few minutes or an hour. When you're hiring for longer periods, other types of service provider can be a better choice.

  • by jamesl ( 106902 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @10:33AM (#45632799)

    Almost 100% of all coal is shipped to electricity providers. Reliability and Economies of Scale.

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      Almost 100% of all coal is shipped to electricity providers. Reliability and Economies of Scale.

      You can buffer a supply of coal and survive a shipping delay
      What happens with your Cloud data access during internet outage on either side?

      • by jamesl ( 106902 )

        If Joe's hard drive dies, he's completely screwed unless he has an up to date backup ... in which case he is out of commission until he buys a new disk and restores his applications and data to it.

        An "internet outage" is a temporary annoyance until "the internet" is restored and business as usual resumes. In my experience the reliability of "the internet" is almost identical to that of electricity -- "the internet" fails when the local power fails.

        • by mjwx ( 966435 )

          If Joe's hard drive dies, he's completely screwed unless he has an up to date backup ... in which case he is out of commission until he buys a new disk and restores his applications and data to it.

          An "internet outage" is a temporary annoyance until "the internet" is restored and business as usual resumes. In my experience the reliability of "the internet" is almost identical to that of electricity -- "the internet" fails when the local power fails.

          Joe might lose a hard drive once in every 3 years. An internet outage is a weekly occurrence.

          • by Ksevio ( 865461 )
            But the internet will return in 30 seconds and everything will be back to normal, but Joe's hard drive is down until he can get a replacement and some data is possibly gone forever.
        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Joe is not an idiot, he runs raid. When his hard disk drive dies, he uses the other one until he grabs the spare hot swap one from the cupboard and inserts it in his server. Joe also has a UPS for power control. Basically Joe has found that servers really are pretty cheap now days and managing them is quite easy especially if he supplements that internal management with some external remote management from a reliable local source. HDisks are so cheap the best backup is another newer HDisk than the one you

      • Amazon's S3 storage service has never been down. Ever. It has 11 9's of durability for your data, and in the event us-east-1 drops off the face of the earth, your data is still accessible from us-west-2 (oregon) without you having to do anything. From anywhere in the world. All for 9 cents/GB/month. That's a fucking steal of that level of accessibility and reliability.

  • by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @10:46AM (#45632889)

    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 [wired.com] and Amazon [wired.com], 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.

    • This. You can add Facebook to the list of growing their own servers. Google, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as many other players, are buying hardware components in railroad consist consignments (whole trains) direct from the components manufacturers. HP, Dell, IBM and the rest of the large players have three stark choices. Grow up and provide datacenter based "Cloud" services in competition against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et. al. Two, grow up and get the hell out of providing hardware to anyone, even the
      • I don't remember Gartner, IDC, and such getting it right at all. I only remember them getting nearly the opposite at their worst and getting it vaguely right at best. Random chance is probably more reliable than them.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @10:50AM (#45632925)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @10:51AM (#45632933)

    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.

    • The same old IT department at your employer is now a Cloud Provider.

      No, the real difference is that a diminishing number of companies have an IT department - at least one that operates any significant number of servers. An increasing number of functions are carried out on "on the cloud" - i.e. hosted by some other company whose server farm is largely application-neutral, and which your company shares with any number of others.

      I guess your point is that this doesn't change things for hosting companies,

    • by jd2112 ( 1535857 )

      If you have a server in your mom's basement . . . congratulations, you are a cloud provider!

      Only if you have moved out of Mom's basement.

  • There are two items at play here...
    1) Server consolidation - when I was at AMD a few years ago, I saw a series of roadmaps showing the predicted consolidation based on hypervisors 300 servers to 30. The immediate thought that went through my mind is "the cost of enterprise CPUs" need to go up otherwise there will be blood in chip market. Servers were the cash cow for the market.
    2) Migration to cloud - this is really consolidation mk II. Move to the cloud and rely on focused

  • by Jody Bruchon ( 3404363 ) on Sunday December 08, 2013 @11:21AM (#45633137)
    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 [wncinfosec.com] 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. [itworld.com] 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.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Wrong. You can have private clouds, which are clouds you own. A "cloud" is just a term for interchangeable services which aren't tied to a particular piece of hardware.

      • While technically true, you are being at least a little disingenuous. When talking about a self-hosted cloud, I've never once heard someone refer to it with the generic "the cloud" label - they always add the "private" qualifier to it, calling it a "private cloud". When people say "the cloud", they mean hosting services.
      • Wrong. You can have private clouds, which are clouds you own. A "cloud" is just a term for interchangeable services which aren't tied to a particular piece of hardware.

        No one knows the actual origin of the term "cloud computing" and what it means can legitimately be different depending on who you ask making the effectiveness of the term fairly useless. The only reason non-IT folk latch onto it is because there's a component of "I don't know what's going on" that they can understand and it makes it seem friendly. The op was merely pointing out why it's not.

        BTW, the cloud symbol was most often used in the 90's on network diagrams to indicate frame-relay links between site

        • I've seen it used on many network diagrams, but by the time I was in university it generally refered to an internet connection. The visual meaning is clear enough. It means 'Something happens here, but the exact description is not important to this diagram.'

    • "The cloud" just means you're putting all of that data on hard drives owned someone else you don't know.

      I wish I could mod you higher than +5. The title of this article could be accurately rewritten as, "45% of All the Server purchasers are complete, unmitigated, fucking morons."

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "The cloud" just means you're putting all of that data on hard drives owned someone else you don't know.

      No, you're missing the point. Not JUST. The cloud is Nifty, Wonderful, Magical Stuff, and Everyone's Using It Except You, Stupid.

      Why? Because look at it from a Senior Manager's standpoint: you're offloading responsibility for control, access, and intrusion detection to the companies data "Somewhere Out There" [youtube.com] as someone's else's responsibility. You've got an ironclad contract that even includes 9x 9's of uptime. Your data stays available to the world no matter what. Why you even make backup costs go aw

    • "The cloud" just means you're putting all of that data on hard drives owned someone else you don't know.

      Wrong. Hosted storage predates cloud computing. Cloud computing is that plus paying per-instance.

  • 100% of all servers will ship to companies whose executives have used the "cloud" buzzword to promote the company.

  • by Tom ( 822 )

    Better headline: IDC expects current trend to continue, extrapolates linearily despite thousands of years of evidence that few things scale in a linear fashion.

    Like all trends in tech, this hype will hit a saturation somewhere and then something else is hot. We've seen this a dozen times before, why do we always look at the newest trend as if we're newborns seing the sun for the first time?

  • Does it mean that 45% of all servers will be used to heat up water ? Or maybe something about weather forecasts.

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