[email protected] (Dan @ Poodles) writes: > It's simple business economics - i.e., cost center vs profit center. > Businesses will always invest in revenue generating first above all > else.
big cloud megadatacenters (hundreds of thousands of systems, millions of processors) had been spending enormous amount to commoditize server systems, for more than decade they say they've been assembling their own systems at 1/3rd the cost of brand name systems. About the time server chip makers said they were shipping more chips to cloud customers (to assemble their own systems) than to server vendors, IBM sold off its server business. http://www.opencompute.org/ They've managed to so commoditize the cost of servers (cost but shows on bottom line) that power & cooling have increasingly become major part of their costs ... and they are putting heavy pressure on server chip makers to significantly improve power (& cooling) use. Also they've managed to drop server cost so drastically that they can provision large number of extra systems for "on-demand" ... and they require systems that power/cooling drop to near zero when idle but are nearly instant on when needed. It is so changing the metrics that server price/performance is being replaced by power efficiency ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness and PUE is also affecting locations chosen to build new megadatacenters. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
