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Data Storage Cloud Hardware IT

Cloud Boom Drives Sales Boom For Physical Servers 94

Posted by timothy from the data's-gotta-live-somewhere dept.
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.
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Cloud Boom Drives Sales Boom For Physical Servers More

Cloud Boom Drives Sales Boom For Physical Servers

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  • No they don't (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @02:32PM (#49793005)

    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!

  • Um, duh? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by bmk67 ( 971394 )

    > Well, it turns out that those other people need to buy a lot of servers.

    Brought to you by Captain Obvious.

  • well that's just silly (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @02:35PM (#49793033) Journal

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

    Oh, wait.

  • Sally sells seashells by the seashore?
    How many chucks would woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

  • Great Cloud Bubble you got there. When these site go under, BOOM, cheap rack hardware.

    Seriously, I stand to make lots of money doing work for these places, so go on ahead and build out those clouds! I'll find new work when the hype is over. No prob.

  • Well, it turns out that those other people need to buy a lot of servers.

    I'm trying to understand the purpose of this statement. Cloud services are great. They are used for backup, collaboration and replacement of in-house servers. I would expect demand to increase.

    • 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).

      • 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.

        • While the cloud provider might have better bandwidth, the non-techie may not.

          • While the cloud provider might have better bandwidth, the non-techie may not.

            If I share photos via the cloud (e.g. Dropbox), I upload them once, and then family, friends, etc. can view them dozens of times, using Dropbox's bandwidth, not mine.

            I store customer facing content in "the cloud". This includes webpages, images, databases, etc. I only need to upload this content once. Then it is downloaded by others thousands of times. So my cloud vendor needs to have far more bandwidth that I need to have.

        • 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 guarantee there are two people out there right now ...

            Two people are not "a lot". The vast majority of people, even non-techies, can understand that if their files are not on their own computer, yet still exist, then they are somewhere else.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

          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.

        • No, that's the whole point of marketing and advertising. People do NOT understand that. They especially do NOT understand that in many ways they are reverting to the 1960s/1970s remote-mainframe. People understand that they get email service from their ISP, and all sorts of services from Google, but the phrase "cloud computing" seems almost intended to obfuscate the fact that at some point it's a specific computer run by a specific company - or maybe it's just obfuscating the responsibility of exactly WH

      • The article should have been pointing out that contrary to popular belief centralizing storage in the cloud doesn't mean less equipment. That's really the point of the article. A 1TB of USB storage is now enterprise level storage arrays, enterprise level networking equipment, custom software, backup power, specialized HVAC and staff to run the whole thing.

        Convenience and added benefits isn't free and that's probably the part that escapes non tech users.

    • 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 f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        How do you know the cloud servers are backup? Hey, the service providers have to make money *somehow*.

      • You seem to be confusing an actual server with a re-purposed computer that corp would write off due to EOL that is re-purposed as a storage server.

        So at home while I could never afford that $24k server, I could setup my own data storage server with tons of space seeing how drives are cheap these days. You can even build in redundancy as well as hot-swap if you really wanted to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        It makes many have access to your data, too. Don't worry I'm sure the cloud provider will appropriately say "oops, sorry" if/when they get hacked.

      • What I was trying to point out is that's a useless statement. The article as a whole is almost useless. Obviously if I dispose of 1TB of local storage to replace it with cloud storage ,servers will need to be built. The benefits are such that it may not be a one to one mapping. Getting rid of a 1TB drive doesn't mean you replace it with only 1TB of storage. You actually replace it with enterprise level storage, networking and security devices backed by custom software to wrap it all up.

        Was the writer of the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        Excellent point, and good example.

    • 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.
    • What you trade in physical hardware you make up for in increased bandwidth.
  • The point is that those other people are buying less servers than all the people moving to the cloud were buying. If that isn't the case then its a broken business model.

    • If that isn't the case then its a broken business model.

      That simply is not true.

      The viability of the business model isn't how many servers you have to buy to be a cloud ... it's how much you can gouge your customers for it.

      Gouge enough, and it's profitable. Don't gouge enough, and then it's a broken business model.

      Pretty much like anything hired as a service.

    • It's saying that the people hosting cloud servers (and other large-scale computing) are buying more servers. This is an indication that people are doing a lot more computing, as large-scale computing tends to be more efficient due to the ability to load balance among a much larger fraction of users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      That's not what's happening, they are buying more servers. The types of computational workloads are also shifting during the cloud migrations. The savings are coming from: staffing efficiencies, reduced real estate costs, reduced power costs, reductions in physical security, savings in the procurement process...

  • Here's one you won't see on /.! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]

    Looks like Slashdot Media's subsidiary is a bad netizen. Shame!

  • 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.

    • 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, reli

    • This could actually be a good thing.

      Computing is meant to be used for improving the business process, so more computing may just means more business-related work being done.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pspahn ( 1175617 )

        This thing.

        Think simply about the ongoing recent improvements to deployment strategies. In the web development world, you used to just load up Filezilla and copy files over to a server. Running a website required a single environment. When you wanted to launch a new website, you created a new server environment and that was it.

        In 2015, there is now Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins, VCS, Ansible, Node, Bower, Composer, (and really this list just continues forever) ... It's not a matter of simply installing Apache

    • Only until the current tech bubble bursts and the unprofitable cloud providers shut down.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        This is demand driven investment. How could that be a bubble? The bubble can happen later when cloud investment starts to outpace customer demand or even starts to generate its own cross over demand. But right now this is not a bubble this is a success.

    • Not in all cases. I manage a five figures monthly cloud deployment, and I look at the bill every month looking for ways to reduce costs. Using the cloud is cheaper than maintaining our own data center, before even considering how capital intensive it would be to carry around unused resources ourselves.

      If I had to have enough spare resources to handle our occasional traffic spikes, I'd have to spend an extra $100,000 upfront for hardware that would sit around doing nothing almost all the time. But when our t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      A pittance. we run 10vms on a single R720 which cost 15k and will last us 5 years and requires a few hours maintain economic a month. Way cheaper than 'the cloud'

  • A cloud boom is called "thunder."

  • Traditional or white-box? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @03:11PM (#49793303)

    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?

    • Why cloud?

      If I'm building and selling an app on someones app store, I'll have already hired a hosting provider, you know the guys that were cloud before it was cloud.
      • Microsoft Azure cloud using Dell containers: http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog... [greenm3.com] HP also builds containers, fills them with compute/storage/network/power/cooling equipment and ships them to customers. It isn't all off-the-rack servers, customers work with HP/Dell engineers to get what they want. The big players saw Open Compute and jumped in on it too.
    • From organizations that aren't large enough to warrant the dedicated in-house resources necessary for effectively being one's own hardware vendor, and the volumes to warrant a direct relationship with Quanta / Foxconn. Have a problem with iLO? Ask the Google or better yet HP's forums. Have a problem with generic beige-box hardware? Better have in-house resources and a Cantonese phrasebook.

  • 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 that are not well treated for their work.

    At least the first mainframe era had some respect for the people involved in the infrastructure. These days, globalization has killed it in favor of mistreatment and abstraction of the workforce.

  • Heroin dealers make the first few hits free or really cheap because when you still have a choice, they need to sell you on it. After you're seriously addicted, the price can be raised because you no longer have the ability to say no.
    Similarly, even if it means losing money for a while, cloud providers have to make the cost per unit of compute per hour look very attractive and practically give it away at first, so your IT and Line-Of-Business groups at your firm think cloud is much cheaper than all that phy

    • > Heroin dealers make the first few hits free or really cheap because when you still have a choice, they need to sell you on it. After you're seriously addicted, the price can be raised because you no longer have the ability to say no.

      I always wondered if you could circumvent this by getting all of your friends to solicit free or really cheap hits.

    • Sounds like I'm in the wrong business....

      Cloud services are pretty much fungible... If provider A tries to turn the thumbscrews, provider B will just under cut them in price and customers will switch in droves the next time the service contract comes up for renewal.

      What will actually happen (if it's not already) is that a small number of larger cloud service providers will corner the market and drive the smaller and less efficient providers into mergers, consolidation or just plain out of business. You w

      • The workers that actually have to deal with it are further screwed - contract labor makes things as healthy and stable as being next to a malfunctioning nuclear reactor. Long-term anything goes out the window and compensation is made on worse terms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        There are a couple of problems with your theory, though it could play out that way. Right now the smaller vendors are often more efficient than the larger ones. Smaller players can be more nimble.

        Second the larger players all have vastly different models. Just to pick a few examples of the bigger players
        AWS -- Generic low quality server experience offered cheaply. Walmart
        Sungard -- Highly custom environments quality management lots of value added labor
        Verizon (was Terremark) -- Moderately custom environ

    • Also, heroin becomes twice as addictive every 18 months.

    • Big data is also going to make these customers extra sticky. When you have exabytes of customer data sloshing around a thousand AWS servers, and you rely on them to deliver critical insights for competitive advantage, how long does that take to migrate out, even if you have the hardware and software all configured right now? Even if everything is set up perfectly and all the technical wrinkles ironed out, it may be a long and ugly process, because you need the big data analytics to be running at full effi

      • Not really a problem for two reasons....

        1. HUGE data generally requires processing power to sort though, so where it might be cheaper to by shares of some data center's pile of rack mounted servers, once you get to a certain size, building your own makes financial sense. I'm guessing, but it sure seems to me that if you are big enough to be worried about how long it takes to move your data, you will have it locally processed anyway and won't be dependent on a cloud provider.

        2. Data has value that is larg

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          The crossover between tricky to move is much lower than the crossover for better to run your own datacenter. Not necessarily the case though for better to run your own cloud out of someone else's colo or better to jointly administer a cloud with a colo provider. So this can happen. The cost of multiple good quality data centers is very very high compared to the cost of getting data out of one.

          As far as GP's post. He's wrong. First off clouds are designed to scale so adding another copy of parts of the

  • I hate reporting like this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @03:56PM (#49793665)

    " 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.

  • Yes. Overbuy and oversell your cloud hosting! Then when the bottom falls out of that market I can profit.

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