Every quarter, Gartner Inc. puts out a report on server market share. I kept looking at it and thinking how it’s missing the point. What about virtual servers? What about AWS? How can we intelligently manage a data center if we don’t know about all the servers?
I thought it would be fun to add VMware and AWS revenues into the Gartner server share chart. So, I took Gartner’s Q1 table and added in Q2 financials for VMware and AWS. I know, apples and oranges, and I left off your favorite vendor and all. Still, it’s fascinating.
Who knew that AWS was tied with IBM as the third largest server vendor? Who knew that IBM still sold servers after selling their PC server business to Lenovo? Wow, that’s a lot of IBM mainframes!
What I didn’t illustrate is that Amazon just about doubled from the prior year, running far ahead of growth for the entire market. If that happens again over the next year, then Amazon could be number one.
Are you ready to have the majority of your new servers running outside the walls of your data center?
I’m not talking about concerns about security, reliability, or latency. With people using nearly $2 billion per quarter of AWS services, I’m guessing those questions are mostly answered. I’m talking about basic IT processes, like tracking inventory, catching faults, collecting performance metrics, all the things that we do to make sure that critical business services are running.
In the intelligent data center, IT processes need to work no matter where the applications reside. The more variety we have, the more we need to simplify and focus on the core business objectives.
