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."
Goodbye Server Admins (Score:2, Insightful)
[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 take months to deploy.
Now we can within an hour have our server set up in Rackspace, have our network admin make a firewall rule for it and it is all set up within the day. Our admins are making themselves irrelevent and they don't even realize what they are doing.
BTW, I am 100% against using "the cloud", but am having a very difficult time justifing that position with what I see on a daily basis.
Re:Goodbye Server Admins (Score:5, Insightful)
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 want the "cloud" term to DIE. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:I want the "cloud" term to DIE. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.