Intel Confirms Decline of Server Giants 152
An anonymous reader writes "A Wired article discusses the relative decline of Dell, HP, and IBM in the server market over the past few years. Whereas those three companies once provided 75% of Intel's server chip revenue, those revenues are now split between the big three and five other companies as well. Google is fifth on the list. 'It's the big web players that are moving away from the HPs and the Dells, and most of these same companies offer large "cloud" services that let other businesses run their operations without purchasing servers in the first place. To be sure, as the market shifts, HP, Dell, and IBM are working to reinvent themselves. Dell, for instance, launched a new business unit dedicated to building custom gear for the big web players — Dell Data Center Services — and all these outfits are now offering their own cloud services. But the tide is against them.'"
Your first server, in 2012 (Score:4, Informative)
Back in the day (say, 2008 as in the article), if you wanted to buy a server, you'd buy one from the big three.
These days, especially with FB and Google leading the way on commodity hardware, it's a different story.
So what should you get for your first server. I.e., you're a small company. You've got a couple of laptops. You're outgrowing mutual Samba.
You maybe want a fileserver. Maybe it'll have a few NICs and a virtual machine on it (Xen?) will do double duty as a external webserver.
So, Core i3, i5, Xeon? Number of processor cores? Forget fast drives, and just buy a lot of memory? Rack? Or tower?
Lockable front (so people can't just come by and reset it)? Hotplug harddrives? (You don't go this if you go the Google build-your-own route.) Redundant hard drives and ECC memory? Or a couple different commodity-style servers + sharding/rsync?
Is a big 3 server worth it? Or search for your own server case + server power supply, etc.?
Re:Your first server, in 2012 (Score:3, Informative)
Search for your own. Priced one from hp/dell and it would have cost $6,000 plus. Built it with the same specs for $3000. That right there is why their server sales are dwindling.
Re:If Google sold servers... (Score:4, Informative)
In google servers, the power supply only make +12volts.
There are no -12V, +5V or -5V rails.
There are, instead, DC-to-DC converters on the motherboard.
Re:No surprise. (Score:4, Informative)
First, a RAID array does not "[run] with a hotspare." When a failure occurs, the hotspare becomes a fully integrated member of the array, at which point you would be running without a hotspare, which on a redundant array isn't that much of a problem considering the Dell replacement would be there within 4 hours of reporting/determining a hardware failure.
It took Sun 3+ weeks to send us a replacement hard disk under warranty and required multiple phone calls. This happened on multiple occasions and was one of the main reasons we decided to stop buying Sun servers.
Yes, the spare became an integrated member of the array. That's true. My point was that the hot spare was now a member of the array and we had no remaining spare disks in the array. Since the server hardware only allowed drives with the Sun firmware, we couldn't keep a supply of spare disks around to swap into the arrays as needed.
Second, Dell servers do not have "firmware-locked disks." I've never heard of such a thing. It's a pretty absurd concept that you could only have OEM hard disks in your box, and an unrealistic expectation that clients would comply.
They did [dell.com]: "In the case of Dell's PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell qualified drives."
Same thing with Sun, at least at that point in time.
Finally, hardware RAID is leaps and bounds above software RAID. There's a reason it's cheaper to go with software...
Software RAID was perfectly adequate for our needs: as backup servers they didn't need to have the utmost performance. As a bonus, we weren't reliant on a specific make and model of hardware RAID card: we could connect the array to any system running MD. Even under heavy load the demand on the CPU was negligible.
The Sun server was the main Samba share for the lab: lab instruments would write data to it and researchers would access that data on their desktops. It also used software RAID with multiple arrays set up. CPU usage was similarly low, even at high loads, and it worked quite satisfactorily for the lab.
You might have saved money up front, but over the life of the server, you could potentially lose much more when you consider catastrophic hardware failure which would be fully covered under the warranty of the Dell box.
SuperMicro offered a comparable warranty, so that wasn't really an issue.
Low- vs. High-level cloud services (Score:4, Informative)
Google provides low-level cloud services (IaaS in the form of Google Compute Engine, PaaS in the form of Google App Engine, RDBMS-in-the-cloud in the form of Google Cloud SQL, bucket-style storage in Google Cloud Storage) as well as higher-level services (all of Google's various apps build on their cloud infrastructure.)
So the Google-Amazon distinction drawn in the parenthetical is inaccurate.