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Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

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Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#21

Post by jeswin »

clavalle wrote: post #6

The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever providing those things.

Very large hosting/cloud providers will eventually build their own hardware. Even if Dell is involved, it's going to be in a supporting role and won't yield the kind of profits X-many server sales will. And besides, support contracts will also be of lesser value. This and Open Compute is not good for Dell-type of shops. Compound that with Microsoft building PCs in a shrinking PC market, the problems are numerous. Dell can't make a Windows PC better than Microsoft.[1]

All this also because these companies have never really tried to attract the best talent by paying above market compensation. It's fine.

[1] The kind of detachable GPU configuration we saw in Surface Book is harder to pull off outside of MS. Doable, but MS will have the advantage of getting inputs directly from the DX12 team.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#22

Post by noir_lord »

mkozlows wrote: post #17
clavalle wrote: post #6

The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever providing those things.

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n... That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So the…

Oth there are thousands (probably millions) of companies out there where cisco kit would be just fine.

Very few companies have the kind of network requirements of Facebook or Google.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#23

Post by exelius »

ap22213 wrote: post #10

First thing I thought when reading the headline was 'so is Oracle'. Glad it's mentioned in the article. AWS is absolutely killing it. Every release cycle, they put out quality products that directly attack Oracle. And, Oracle is in the bad position of having to eat their existing profitable business lines to compete. Now, of course, cloud isn't here yet. There are certainly lots of issues around security, auditing, p…

Oracle is not quite as fucked as everyone else on the rest of the list. Oracle has the benefit of offering products that solve very real, very complex business problems: they aren't selling technology infrastructure. Oracle's core products are largely around financial and operational automation, and they are well understood by integrators across many industries. Their biggest threat is something like Salesforce -- but even then, the capital cycle for ERP systems is something stupid like 15-25 years. IBM is largely in the same boat as Oracle, albeit with slightly more government focus.

Oracle is ultimately a software company. Where their customers run that software is largely irrelevant to their core business. Is there margin to make by running an Oracle cloud? Sure, but the bulk of their profits are made just by licensing their LOB software packages and the associated annual support contracts. Oracle will be fine, and Larry Ellison will be able to buy an even bigger yacht in a decade.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#24

Post by devit »

The problem of these companies is that they sell highly overpriced hardware that is in the best case sold because the consumer really wants support and risk avoidance, in the middle case because of vendor lock-in and in the worst case because of direct or indirect corruption.

Obviously this is not economically efficient, and thus eventually the scheme has to unravel.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#26

Post by stephengillie »

parasubvert wrote: post #15
iheartmemcache wrote: post #7

This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome. This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to choose an implementation. I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2…

And then there is Elon Musk who told his CIO to build their own manufacturing planning system because he refused to give that much money to SAP or Oracle. Ps. Having migrated an SAP off of AIX, I'd say you'd be better served with something like a VBlock or even VirtuStream or Amazon cloud to run it. There also are price and performance incentives to run R/4 on HANA than on Oracle.

Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#27

Post by creshal »

ThomaszKrueger wrote: post #3

I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.

Even if I wanted to put everything into the cloud, our main office has 2 MBit upload on a good day, with no infrastructure improvement in sight (old building on top of a hill in rural Austria). And even our branch office only gets 10/10 MBit in the middle of the country's second-largest city.

We're going to keep local servers for a looong time to come.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#28

Post by mkozlows »

adrianN wrote: post #5
ThomaszKrueger wrote: post #3

I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.

Yes, there are plenty of businesses which would never put their data on someone else's servers. Also, you should never underestimate corporate inertia. Switching to a new system is immensely expensive, for many companies it won't happen, ever. Just look how many companies are still using decade old hardware and scour ebay for replacement 286 processors.

This isn't an argument against them being the "walking dead."

If nobody was using them anymore, they'd just be the dead-dead. The "walking" part comes from their existing support base propping them up.

"Oracle and EMC are fine, just like 286s!" is not an argument that would comfort an executive at those companies.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#29

Post by parasubvert »

stephengillie wrote: post #26
parasubvert wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there is Elon Musk who told his CIO to build their own manufacturing planning system because he refused to give that much money to SAP or Oracle. Ps. Having migrated an SAP off of AIX, I'd say you'd be better served with something like a VBlock or even VirtuStream or Amazon cloud to run it. There also are price and performance incentives to run R/4 on HANA than on Oracle.

Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.

You can fix a VBlock yourself quite fine if you stay within its constraints, though the point is to get out of the business of fixing this stuff yourself - it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. Wire and walk away as a transition towards data center zero. Yes theyre isolated by design, but unified management isnt hard to do. I've seen places save tens of millions getting off IBM or EDS outsourcing replaced with converged.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#30

Post by manigandham »

mkozlows wrote: post #17
clavalle wrote: post #6

The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever providing those things.

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n... That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So the…

Facebook, Google, Amazon (while big) are nowhere near the majority of the servers used in the world.
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