back to article Apple orders white box servers from Taiwan for data centre refresh

Apple's future bit barns look to be built around white box servers from Taiwan, according to a Digitimes report. The Taiwanese outlet notes that Apple recently clambered aboard the Open Compute Project, and says local white-box server makers have recently received orders from Cupertino. Those orders are to replace servers in …

  1. GaryP

    2+2=....

    Out of the blue in January Amax, a Chinese OCP hardware supplier opened up overnight in Shannon, Ireland a month *before* Apple announced the new Irish DC an hour away. Coincidence?

  2. big_D Silver badge
    Trollface

    But, but...

    they can't do that. You can only run OS X on genuine Apple hardware...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But, but...

      "they can't do that. You can only run OS X on genuine Apple hardware..."

      Apple's cloud stuff currently largely runs on Hyper-V Server / Azure.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: But, but...

        more like RHEL...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Unfortunately for Dell and HP there's no reason they would win hyperscale business.

    The premium on branded stuff is the apportioned value of innovation. Regular enterprises buy in that innovation by paying software licenses and buying branded hardware because the cost of R and D doesn't exceeds the benefit they'd gain.

    Hyperscale firms spread that innovation across their huge estates and so writing software and designing hardware from scratch yields tremendous cost savings and competitive advantages. Even if Dell and HP got to a comparable price point (which would be unprofitable for them) an inhouse solution would still have the advantage of keeping designs secret.

    Fortunately enterprise compute isn't going away, but cloud (love it or hate it) will eat away at its scale and growth so Wall Street will want to see other growth streams (I've never understood why gracefully declining while handing legacy profits back to shareholders is so frowned upon, but it is).

    Michael Dell once famously advised Apple to shut down and return money to shareholders. We may not be far off the time when they can offer him the same suggestion (obviously private shareholders now, but shareholders nonetheless).

  4. Erik4872

    Not all places are hyperscale

    At opposite ends of the spectrum are two very different compute users:

    - Silicon Valley startup company style -- cloud first, cloud always, no hardware onsite except the trendy MacBook Pros our developers use, and no money for systems R&D

    - Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft -- millions of identical servers to serve the cloud to everyone, the ability to have data center minions take care of maintenance, and lots of R&D money.

    Somewhere in the middle is everyone else. You don't just buy an HP, Lenovo or Dell server for the box - you buy the warranty, the integration of all the components, and the driver/firmware updates needed to keep it running. That's where enterprise computing lives. These vendors can't hope to win contracts for cloud providers because the cloud providers don't care about the warranty. The company I work for deploys infrastructure in locations around the world. We don't employ our own hardware technicians. when something breaks HP comes onsite and replaces the parts. The cost of doing that is built into the server and the service contract. Apple has 100 acre data centers and probably employs 2 or 3 techs onsite to change out hardware whenever they get around to it -- the cloud allows for that. Even companies that build their own private clouds usually use vendor supported hardware, since taking care of the hardware is still a concern when you run it yourself.

    Unless absolutely every company buys into the public cloud completely, there will be a place for enterprise grade hardware. It won't be the same as it was before, just like desktop PCs aren't selling as well now that tablets are a thing. But everyone who buys the Gartner predictions just isn't thinking it through.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nobody cares about the logos displayed in your data centre...

    ... that's why Apple doesn't make servers. You can only sell overpriced items if they can be shown off.

    But it's anyway a bit funny that the most brand-conscious company in the world buys unbranded items... don't get me wrong, from a financial and technical perspective may make senses, especially when you have the skill needed to build, configure and maintain less supported systems, but it's funny anyway.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nobody cares about the logos displayed in your data centre...

      "that's why Apple doesn't make servers"

      See https://www.apple.com/uk/osx/server/specs/

      They might not sell many, but they do make them....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nobody cares about the logos displayed in your data centre...

        That's just server varnish over OSX (which being a *BSD is not that diffcult) - bu where's the hardware? Once it made a couple of very entry level servers, but they are no longer available. Just installing some somewhat "server" OS on a computer doesn't make it a real "server", server hw is today something designed from groud up for that task.

  6. P. Lee
    Coat

    The question is...

    Tiger running on Tyan's Power systems?

  7. Probie

    Why do you need hyperscale to use White boxes ?

    Seriosuly why would it be so hard for the Enterprise to consume whiteboxes? Think about it if you have "enough" enterprises to make a community (both as a supply chain community and a more traditional open source software/support community) then what little value the OEM's provide is chipped away. If you say a "guarentee of performance" I am sure the ODM's could provide that at some cost between a whitebox and a OEM model.

    Do not get me wrong OEMs can be great at innovating things, but lately the seem to be on the "me too" phase rather than innovating. Then again the software vendors seem to be being a bit shy about that as well with regards to HCL's vs Support etc ... There is a lot of needless waste that can be trimmed out of the supply chain to enterprises. What a white box solution challenges is for the OEM's and the Software vendors (see OS vendors, Virtualization vendors etc ....) to be transparent about what they are charging for with granularity down to the component/feature strata. I am not so sure that is a bad thing. You could certainly shed a fee marketing research types at the OEM's as a result.

    I am not a open source zealot, I am just tired with OEM's making money of things which are just standard and commodity now adays such as IPMI or remote manegment consoles, and telling me it is the "monkeys testicles" of awesomness this time around, its not is a remote managment module. Give me the one I have used for 5 years, stop developing it to make me coiffe or tea and do something worthwhile with the money saved.

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