Comments on: Facebook and Open Compute just blew up the server and disrupted a $55B market

By: luis

luis — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:32:17 +0000

Not 1 mention of Fusion IO despite being a key part of facebooks plans

By: Vishwakarma

Vishwakarma — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:11:13 +0000

You of all the people, Ms. Higginbotham, were not serious when you wrote that article, were you?

I have high respect for your reporting, but, this is just plain horse manure. This has been done for ages, even before since I was born … and I was born a long time ago.

By: kevinmarvin

kevinmarvin — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:23:18 +0000

Great point. Additionally, it’s either hubris or inexperience to say that any reasonable server engineer in a fortune 5000 company is now going to begin again dirtying his hands swapping out parts in servers. That totally like went out of style like 10 years ago.

Building your own server is *not* the new black.

By: bachandblue

bachandblue — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:45:51 +0000

no redundancy plan on failure failure………

By: amarakus

amarakus — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:10:14 +0000

OK now that we have seen all the comments about the writing… let’s consider the message. Open Compute was and still is a Facebook technology. But, with the release of standards and companies willing to make components it is becoming a disruptive technology in the server market. The question is how are server vendors going to respond. I am currently working on building a Hadoop cluster. Servers represent a significant cost. Every component is much more expensive than the parts cost, sometimes by more than 100%. This is show the server guys make money. For my application, Open Compute would be ideal… and it is almost ready. I would have called the current state of the threat to server vendors a shot across the bow. But, the disruption is coming. The server vendors can take the proprietary approach and try to differentiate their product… or join the fray and support Open Compute. In the end, the ability to tailor the hardware to the intended purpose is pretty compelling. So in essence, the point of the story is that the server market is changing. And, that is probably an understatement. So, “disrupted” is probably a correct observation.

By: lawrencejonesukfast

lawrencejonesukfast — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:28:38 +0000

It describes this as a next-gen server…..

It’s just hardware in a box, like all servers. What it does is irrelevant.

It sounds like another form of cloud technology, and if I am not mistaken there are a number of vendors all claiming to have the lead in this race.

By: Cy Johnson

Cy Johnson — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:47:04 +0000

Let me seed some more misleading headlines for the author’s use. From 2007: “Apple destroys the phone market with the iPhone release.” From 2002: “Desktop Linux set to kill Windows.” For in a few weeks: “Blackberry 10 set to dominate the central Canadian smartphone market.”

By: Cy Johnson

Cy Johnson — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:42:49 +0000

Funny that in college English 102 twenty-five years ago, I got a C because of two errors in my paper which led to a mandatory deduction in letter grade. I wonder how low college standards are for English now.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:32:55 +0000

Yeah, and she has spinach between her teeth too. And a bad hair cut….

How about just talking about the article. If her grammar stinks, email her.

By: JXM

JXM — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:41:21 +0000

There are two fundamental questions here.

Servers/compute for most organizations comprise only a small, <10%, portion of their overall IT spend on open systems. The larger costs are operational, license, storage, etc. Does cutting 20% out of the capex costs realy justify the transition costs and added complexity of a modular architecture?

The second question is what is the appropriate level of granularity? Will companies really operationalize cost controls and hardware specific functions at the chip or NIC level? Sure, I can see it if a company is running tens of thousands of servers as their primary revenue generator. But for a company for whom IT is not their factory, this seems highly unlikely.