Live data from Hacker News

Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

wired.com

51–60 of 73 posts

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

#51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So two things: 1. Cloud providers are making it easy for legacy businesses to take baby steps. You don't have to use a NoSQL solution with AWS Dynamo, you can use Postgres with RDS. Or if you're hyper-conservative/stuck with legacy stuff, you can run Oracle with RDS. Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy of Oracle on it. You don't have to jump to full modernity right away, you can take the easy wi…

Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy of Oracle on it. Good luck with the licensing for running Oracle on an EC2 instance. How many different cores will Oracle potentially be running on? Thousands with the way EC2 works. Just wait till Oracle does an audit and watch your back licensing fees skyrocket. But don't worry! There's a way out. Just move it all to Oracle's new in house cloud. They'll even…

No doubt. I tried to move our Oracle installation[1] from an aging box to our VMWare server and the price jump was going to be something on the order of 5x.

1) another one of those fun vendor software needs Oracle things

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

#52

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…

Don't forget the case where the last CIO who was trusted and is friends with the CEO and CFO went to work for a major vendor.

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

#53
I was hoping for an informative well-written article. Alas, I was to be disappointed. Ignoring the juvenile profanity and the condescending rhetoric, the author completely misdiagnoses the technology shift that will be the real game changer ... namely, the advances in memory architecture. Whether it's memristors or Xpoint 3D or some other architecture, data storage will be completely turned on its head over the next 10 years. The lumbering giants (who bring in 4 times more in net profit in a single quarter than Pure Storage garnered in its IPO) will have to be nimble in the future, but I wouldn't call them the 'walking dead' just yet.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure? Internet traffic follows a power law distribution.

Yes. What does internet traffic have to do with it?

There are millions of SMBs and tens of thousands of large corporations around the world that own server hardware. A tiny percent of that is the major internet companies.

The designs for hardware are changing but the providers are still going to be the usual companies that are good at this and have all the manufacturing in place. For example a lot of banks have started to switch to Open-Compute designs [1] but they will still buy these from Dell or HP.

Software is a different story.

1. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/03/11/open-...

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

#55
post #8

Wtf is this article talking about? Microsoft fucked because they have Windows on 95% of computers? Agh, i'm too exasperated to continue my train of thought. Yes, everybody is fucked because of Facebook and Google and MongoDB.

There's a lot of stupidity here (or perhaps one might charitably call it excessive glee, or even plain old clickbait), but it's been a long time since 95% of computers ran Windows, if that was ever true in the first place.

You'd have to start by defining "computer". If we use a technically reasonable but broad in journalism's terms definition of "device containing a CPU with integrated MMU", then we're including every mainframe, server, desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, industrial control system, laser printer or multi-function document management system, router, network or storage switch, storage system controller, sound mixer, and countless other devices. A very small and diminishing fraction of those machines run Windows.

Even if you limited the definition to include only things we traditionally think of as computers, namely mainframes, servers, desktops, and laptops, Microsoft's market share is something like 30%, though it's very difficult to measure and once again subject to definition; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste.... And again, that's been declining for a long time. Even the most generous interpretations that include only desktops and laptops don't get you to 95%; you can narrow-definition your way up to about 90%, and that assumes "market share" includes copies that were made in violation of license and/or law (and thus for which Microsoft received no money).

The reality is that Microsoft is a niche player, not because they lost a market they were previously winning but because that market itself became a small part of something much bigger, in which Microsoft was never especially competitive. As noted by the author, they've been investing heavily in changing that, but the early returns aren't much to talk about. Windows Mobile/Phone is a complete dud, Surface is a weak seller despite recent improvements, and Azure is at best a very distant second in IAAS (see http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartn...). What's remarkable is not that Microsoft is doing so poorly but that they're the only enterprise computing company that even appears to be trying. I think that's what the author was expressing. The characterization as "fucked" comes from Ashlee Vance and should be given the credibility one would assume considering the source. There's little question that most of these companies' positions of relative importance are in decline and have been for a long time. But some, especially Microsoft, still have enormous sums of cash and businesses that are continuing to generate more of it. However irrelevant such a company is, it's still a long way from going out of business. Conversely, no amount of cash is a substitute for organic sales growth.

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#57

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.

Musk isn't worryabout being fired and making his mortgage payments (eve though he once came perilously close to being broke on his liquid investments). Most people charged with making IT decisions are worried about this.

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

#58
The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can all just "Live in the cloud".

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

#59
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…

*in their clouds. They still use traditional networking and servers on campus.

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

#60
post #53

I was hoping for an informative well-written article. Alas, I was to be disappointed. Ignoring the juvenile profanity and the condescending rhetoric, the author completely misdiagnoses the technology shift that will be the real game changer ... namely, the advances in memory architecture. Whether it's memristors or Xpoint 3D or some other architecture, data storage will be completely turned on its head over the next…

The point of exactly how profitable the "walking dead" are is vastly underrated. The decision is between making giant profits now with low-risk VS miniscule profits but potentially large future profits with high-risk.
Post reply on HN