Cloud Expansions Boosting Server Sales

This year server vendors saw the biggest growth in shipments in over 4 years so far. This is mainly due to the continued investments in the hyperscale server infrastructures that power all of the private and public cloud services. So this is a really big year for the industry, the best since the huge economic downturn a few years back. In the first quarter shipments grew by 13%, which is about 2.7 million units shipped out. Revenue grew by 18%, equaling a staggering $13.4 billion.

There is a really strong demand for the hyperscale area in the United States, which is driving the growth we are seeing. Hyperscale is a term that describes the systems that use thousands of servers to provide power to cloud and big data infrastructures. Every form factor is in more demand too, including rack-optimized, blade, density-optimized, and tower servers.

Hewlett-Packard was the number one vendor in revenue and in volume, closely followed by Dell in the number two spot. Hewlett-Packard rack-optimized servers are in very high demand at the moment. Even though their server business is pretty small compared to everything else they offer, they experience a huge amount of revenue growth compared to this time last year.

Oddly enough, even though there was so much growth in the server department, they weren't able to keep up with the competition. Overall, their revenue share dropped from 25.5% to 23.8% and it's marketing share by volume dropped 2.6% points down to 20%. Last week, Hewlett-Packard said that they are planning on splitting up into two separate companies later this year. One company would be selling enterprise equipment and services while the other company would be selling the standard PCs and printers.

Dell is kind of in the same boat. They had increased revenue and shipments but were not able to keep up with the rest of the market. Dell's share of revenue and shipments both slipped by just under 1 percentage point leaving them at 17.1% and 19%. They did, however, see revenue growth in rack-optimized products and density-optimized servers as well.

HP and Dell were at the top of the market when it came to revenue and shipments, but product mix made for some differences between the rest of the top five rankings by revenue and shipments. IBM was in third place for server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems. Lenovo was number three in server shipments ahead of Huawei Technologies and Inspur Electronics.

While HP and Dell led the market by both revenue and shipments, product mix led to some differences between the rest of the top five rankings by revenue and shipments. IBM had the third-largest server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems, while Lenovo was third by server shipments, ahead of Huawei Technologies and Inspur Electronics. Lenovo and IBM's numbers were also of course affected by Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's x86 server business.

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Cisco has a revenue growth of 44.4% from last year which is way above average. Their blade server business is also growing and getting more revenue from blade servers than every company on the list besides Hewlett-Packard.

It's good to see the server industry see growth. Cloud computing has driven business in other sectors of technology and the server industry was definitely in need of a pick-me-up.

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Cloud Computing Is Changing The Way That We Use Servers

There are not too many people out there who are familiar with virtual servers. To many people that even know what a server is, they view it as a large tower of green lights that holds all your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Many companies will use their own personal servers so that everyone who is connected to those servers can access company data and files. It's one of the sure fire ways to help keep company and personal data safe. Think of the servers that a company uses as massive storage decks. They're able to back up all of their files on these servers, store data, and access whatever file or project they might need to access all from the servers. The only thing is that we are becoming more digital. We are starting to digitize many of our services. Sending mail and letters turned into Email and texting. Now, our servers are becoming more digital because of cloud computing.

What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is a very hard term to define. It all comes down to what you feel the "Cloud" is. There are many who find it to be anything you can get on a virtual server over the internet. There are others who think that it's another fancy term for whatever consumable content you can find on the internet. Neither of these answers are wrong, necessarily. Cloud computing is also referred to in a more commercial view point. It is thought that it can be defined as "encompassing any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the internet, extends IT's existing capabilities." Essentially, anything that has a separate virtual server for it's services or applications that you have to access via the service's provider can be considered cloud computing.

What's The Difference Between Them?
It may not seem like there is too much of a difference between the two different servers (virtual and real), and in a way there isn't. They are both there to hold specific data programmed by the IT specialists that work for that specific service or company. One is physical and the other is accessed over the internet. Take utility computing for example. This concept might not be "new", but its slowly becoming more cloud integrated. Many larger companies, like Amazon, are seeing to it that that happens. While it may not be used for anything pertaining to how the service or application operates, it can help add more capacity for the site to run smoothly and even allow for more storage space. The fact is that instead of IT needing to go down to the server room to get to the server and fix or alter something, cloud computing makes it easier because they can just access the networks virtual server to alter what they need to alter.

It's On The Rise
Cloud computing is slowly beginning to take off as time goes by. Software is being offered as a service through virtual servers. It's gotten to the point now that even development environments are being offered as services through servers. There are restrictions though. The application that's being developed is based off of the infrastructure of the provider. Your app's service is then delivered to the users via the provider's internet as well. All of these services are being offered through virtual servers as it's easier for IT to make changes and help. Some even view it as more cost effective. If companies can offer services to develop, deliver, and access services and applications via a cloud server, that only means that it's becoming more popular than people think.

Now just because we are getting more virtual with our servers doesn't mean that it's still the safest route to go. Having our services and apps become more easily accessible is a plus, but that also means that it can be more easily hacked if certain precautions aren't taken.

One thing is for sure though, there is a lot more to cloud computing and cloud technology that backing up your music on iCloud.

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The Largest Cloud in the World is Dark, Shady, and Criminally Owned

When thinking of the largest cloud computing network known to man, what companies come to mind? Microsoft? Sure they have alot of computers but not even close. Amazon? Getting bigger but still not even in the same ballpark. Google? As monstrous as their cloud is, its a mere drop in the ocean. The largest cloud in the tech world isn't controlled by a brick and mortar corporation, but rather it is a network of computers controlled by the Conficker computer worm across more than 200 countries in the world. So just how big is the worlds biggest cloud?

"Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally with more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth." said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar.

In other words the biggest cloud on the planet is controlled by an unknown criminal enterprise that rents out their botnet to send spam, perform a denial-of-service attack, hack computers, spread malware, and steal personal information and money. In fact, it is believed that much of the comment spam that plagues many blogs is spawned from a portion of the conficker cloud. Put simply, the cloud is "mobbed up."

In many ways, the Conficker cloud is much more competitive than legit vendors. The operators have experience with the virus dating back to 1998 and their footprint is bigger than any cloud previously seen. On top of that there are no moral, ethical, or legal constraints with the added bonus of zero costs. There is even an unlimited supply of new resources readily available as the conficker spreads far and wide to take over and steal more computing power.

Just like legitimate cloud vendors, Conficker is available for rent and can be found just about anywhere in the world a user would want their cloud to be based. Users can choose the amount of bandwidth they want, the kind of operating system they want to use, and even what kind of services will be installed into the cloud such as spam distribution, dos attacks, etc.

By the way, just in case you were wondering, the biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google which is made up of approximately 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Coming in second is Amazonwith 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth. The third largest legit cloud is owned by Rackspace, which offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps.

Although the last major attack performed by the Conficker cloud occurred over a year ago against the Manchester police department, the virus is still considered a very real and palpable threat. If you fear you are infected by the Conficker virus you can try out this Conficker Eye Chart which pulls images from three sites that Conficker is known to block and displays them in a box. If all the images show up you're in good shape, but if one or more doesn't display it could indicate a Conficker or other malware infection. Be aware that if you are browsing from behind a proxy, you may be able to see all the images and still be infected.

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Fujitsu Introduces Xeon Based Primergy System

Following the release of Intel's next generation Xeon 5600 server processor, Fujitsu America has joined the ranks of server partners looking towards the cloud. The Japanese based Fujitsu plans to roll out its new Xeon 5600 equipped Primergy systems through its American counterpart specifically targeting cloud computing environments.

The Primergy CX1000 system can hold up to 38 of the 1U CX1000 rack systems which, according to Jon Rodriguez, senior product manager for Primergy at Fujitsu America, allows for a more efficient high-density computing system. In addition, the Primergy systems sport a new cabinet design featuring shared power distribution and new cooling components. The motivation behind this new design was to eliminate traditional "hot aisle - cold aisle" setups seen in many datacenters and to allow the Fujitsu cabinets to be placed back-to-back.

Rather than placing a power supply on each rack, Fujitsu chose to instead implement a central power supply that will feed each individual rack. Also, the backs of the cabinets have been sealed off and large fans and exhaust vents are now located on the top of the server. Like previously mentioned, these racks can be placed back to back allowing for a more efficient use of space in the data center.

According to Fujitsu, these cabinets are up to 20 percent more power efficient than other comparable server systems due to their Cool-Central design which dictates how air flows throughout the cabinet. Essentially this allows the system to separate heat from various components and dictates where fans are placed for optimum air flow. Target markets for the CX1000 are going to primarily revolve around cloud computing providers and hosts, businesses looking to reduce costs by deploying their own cloud servers, Web 2.0 environments, and high-performance computing markets.

The Primergy CX1000 systems will be available from Fujitsu America resellers by the end of march. A fully loaded rack with 38 servers, a single processor per socket, and 16GB of memory will run in the ballpark of $89,000 per rack. Of course, price will increase as more CPUs, hard drives, and memory is added.

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Netapp's New Cloud Computing Management Solutions

Faced with today's increased economic pressures, many IT organizations are turning towards cloud computing as a means to help reduce costs and improve efficiencies in their data centers. Service providers play a very important role in this migration to the cloud by helping customers understand these benefits and by delivering a wide range of IT services via the cloud. Last week Netapp unveiled new design guides and capabilities geared specifically towards service providers with the goal of helping them deliver greater value to their cloud customers. Furthermore company officials said their new tools will fulfill the dual role of delivering cloud applications and services to their enterprise clients while also increasing functionality and security for service providers building their own cloud environments.

NetApp Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI): The SOI leverages NetApp storage and serves as a standardized and unified infrastructure. This gives service providers the ability to consume and deploy storage, bandwidth, and resources in a repeatable manner which helps speed time to market, improve flexibility, reduce costs, and increase service levels for their customers.

Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS): NetApp now provides a design guide that enables service providers to rapidly and effectively deploy archive and disaster recovery services. This includes NetApp technologies such as FlexClone for improved disaster recovery testing, SnapLock for compliance, and MultiStore for secure multi-tenancy. This DPaaS cloud design guide will help service providers reduce costs and complexities as well as increase flexibility.

Backup/Recovery as a Service (BRaaS): NetApp has teamed with Asigra, a leading provider of cloud backup and recovery software in order to quickly and efficiently deploy BRaaS solutions to providers. The Asigra Cloud Backup software runs on the NetApp SOI, combining to offer a truly scalable and secure backup recovery solution for the cloud.

NetApp Open Management: NetApp's open management capabilities now allow service providers to leverage NetApp's storage capabilities, regardless of whether service providers use NetApp or another IT service's virtualization framework. This enables service providers to link their IT service management and orchestration portals easily to NetApp's storage automation engine for seamless storage and protection services.

"NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's vice president of solutions and alliances, said in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."

For more reading see: Why Rent A File Server.

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