Rack servers drive $120bn data centre infrastructure market

How many rack servers are there in the world? Umm … we can tell you this: about $10bn-worth were sold in Q3 this year or 34 per cent of a global data center infrastructure market worth $29bn in the quarter. So says Synergy Research Group, which compiled the numbers: its definition of data center infrastructure includes servers …

[phil dude]

errr...information free?

I read the press-release - information free.

Whenever I hear $COMPANY sells loads of stuff, I think "how did they count that?".

Since using a rack server , installing an non-encumbered OS (e.g. Linux) does not require a license, and therefore a reliable measure.

Or am I missing something here?

My point about the copy-n-paste-data free still stands.

P.

[chivo243]

Didn't I see this at the race track?

HPE out in front, Cisco in the running and Microsoft close behind.. It's HPE fading fast, Cisco lagging behind and Microsoft bringing up the rear. ?? We'll update you when the race is over!

[Lou 2]

But but .. splutter ... won't somebody think about the clouds!

Proves the point - doesn't matter how much the cloud advocates promise the brave new world - it still has to run on something.

Lets chuck some more VM's, Docker instances and SDN and ADN into the mix. Lets face it - the compiler writers have gone lazy, the programmers are all MS drones and everything is "fixed in software".

But need to run an app - here I'll spin up a VM, need some more storage - sprinkle some cloud storage pixie dust, running out of Vm licenses - ooh lets spin a a few Dockers! Bandwidth - what is that - I'll just copy the whole DB back and forth, But at the bottom - bare metal - silicon and storage, network cables connected network routers and switches, UPS'es and air conditioning - racks of flickering money eaters.

Fundamentally doesn't matter how well we eat - we still need to go to the toilet at the end of the day. So plan well young Grasshopper - despite all the sleight of hand, mist and clouds, it still need to fundamentally run on something.

[toughluck]

Shhh

Hush, you! Don't tell them that! Cloud and virtualization were supposed to be used for their inherent efficiency and in case of virtualization, the idea was to consolidate hardware so much that you'd have needed less of it. Well, that's only true if you can eliminate overhead.

If your staff never cared about using available resources effectively, switching to VMs won't change that.

Worse still, they will simply spin up new VM instances at a whim, effectively raising your costs, not lowering them.

If you already had good sysadmins, your infrastructure was already running at high efficiency, and switching to virtualized workloads would only add overhead, licensing costs, require retraining and possibly hiring, all of which costs money.

And at the end, your bare metal is running the same workload as before (equivalent of x servers) plus hypervisors (equivalent of y servers) plus middleware (equivalent of z servers) plus you have to account for overhead (n>100%) as it invariably turns out to be not as effective as before. For positive values of x, y and z, n×(x+y+z) > x.

That's something that people making purchasing decisions fail to understand, for some reason believing that new x is smaller than old x, y and z is negative and overhead doesn't exist.

[The Average Joe]

Pay up and go bankrupt...

LOL too funny!

If the Azure group had to pay for the SQL and Windows Server licenses they would go broke. 500,000 Windows Data center licenses...

None of those kits are worth a damn when they are EOLed. Who is going to run a Google motherboard with 1 - 10 gig port, no PCIe slots, 1 SATA port and 32 memory slots...

Will those custom CPU's from Intel work in your HP DL380... How about that goofy timing specific RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pay up and go bankrupt...

"If the Azure group had to pay for the SQL and Windows Server licenses they would go broke. 500,000 Windows Data center licenses..."

Azure runs on the Microsoft Azure Hypervisor - a version of Hyper-V Server. Hyper-V Server is a zero license cost completely free download:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2012-r2

Of course 75% of the workload of Azure is Windows based, but the licensing discount isn't quite as large as you imply...