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.'"
Re:Your first server, in 2012 (Score:4, Insightful)
With the same specs? With hot-plug drives, true hardware raid, iLO/iDRAC lights-out management, secondary bios if flashing fails?
Get a refurbished HP gen 5 or 6 server instead of building your own. Perfomance will be sufficient, don't worry. It's well below $3000, and you get enterprise quality hardware.
Re:Your first server, in 2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as anything, I think virtualization is murdering the market. I bought a $3000 server that hosts six VM guests; two Windows installs (one a DC, one an Exchange server) and four Linux. A couple of years ago, I would have needed at least three servers to do it (one for each Windows install) and one Linux. Admittedly they wouldn't have to have the balls that the new server has, but still, I think we'd be talking about $4000 to $6000 in hardware. Even worse, these are all just basically images sitting on hard drives, so they can essentially be perpetual. Two or three years, when the current server dies or I decide I need more juice, just move the VM images over and away I go, and with hardware prices the way they are, I doubt the next generation server will cost any more than the one I have now, and maybe even less.
Factor in the cloud, VPS hosting and so on, the demand for servers will inevitably drop.
Re:Your first server, in 2012 (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost certainly. The problem is most techies - especially young ones - only look at a handful of specifications (CPU, RAM, # disks) and the sticker price, because they think their time is free.
Re:If Google sold servers... (Score:4, Insightful)
Other motherboards make use of similar dc-dc converters and have for a long time. It's nice to have a 12vdc bus; makes it more dense. But it's neither innovative or unique. Instead, it's all about density and design for a specific purpose. These aren't retail-able machines. And there are now luscious racks you can obtain with lots of dense Intel, AMD, and even ARM-powered systems. If you have the application, someone has a design.
It might be a good design for you, and not for others.
Re:If Google sold servers... (Score:4, Insightful)
He is rehashing - in a rather rather pained and circuitous fashion - the "if you lose your internet connectivity you can't do any work" argument.
This point is not entirely without merit, but generally fails to recognise that a) most companies these days can't do a lot of work without an internet connection anyway and b) internet connectivity is usually a lot easier and cheaper to make highly available and redundant that server infrastructure.