Compute

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty

The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago.

Compute

Inside Facebook’s Future Rack And Microserver Iron

The hyperscalers and cloud builders have been setting the pace for innovation in the server arena for the past decade or so, particularly and publicly since Facebook set up the Open Compute Project in April 2011 and ramping up as Microsoft joined up in early 2014 and basically created a whole new server innovation stream that was unique from – and largely incompatible with – the designs put out by Facebook.

Compute

IT Spending Prognostication During The Great Infection

The Great Infection is unique among recessions in that it is essentially a self-imposed economic downturn, not the result of over-exuberance or excess optimism or greed, but by a spikey ball of fat that is not alive but is more like a self-replicating biological machine that only knows how to do one thing: Copy itself if it reaches the right sticky environment in time before it dries out and falls apart.

Compute

The Serious Business Of Being A Server OEM

Not everybody is a hyperscaler or large public cloud builder, and no two companies are happier about that than Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two largest original equipment manufacturers in the world for servers and storage and also the two companies that chased plenty of sales at these webscale datacenter operators in years gone by but which have learned, of necessity, to walk away from deals where they can’t make money or even lose money.