back to article Fake servers sell better than real servers

Vendors who were hoping to get rich on the server virtualization trade have been disappointed by the effect the economic meltdown has had on their business. Just when virtualization products from VMware, Citrix Systems, Microsoft, and a few others have the kind of management features to make them enterprise grade, companies are …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    "(you have to pay money for the details)"

    Exactly. Pure hype. Separating fools from their money. Some of us know better.

    amfM, I look forward to your commentary.

  2. Joshua 1
    FAIL

    What? Who is smoking the whacky tobacky?

    These figures make no sense.

    El Reg recently reported that VMware alone has sold 1/2 million copies of vSphere and an additional 1/2 million free esxi downloads.

    Now you just need to add all the other vendors sales figures on top of this and scratch your head as to who as telling porkies.

    Personally, my own server sales ratio of Hypervisor vs traditional OS is over 10:1 VM vs non-VM.

    Go figure! (literally) :)

  3. TeeCee Gold badge
    Alert

    Comparing oranges with apples.

    Probably a bad analogy in this case, given that the word "apple" is trademarked up, down and sideways when used in connection with computers. Particularly so since the owners of said word are well known for sueing the living shit out of anyone overstepping the mark at the drop of a hat.

    Personally I'd have gone with something entirely unrelated to any sort of fruit like chalk and cheese, to be on the safe side.

  4. Robin

    Box

    On a tangent, when are we going to stop calling computers 'boxes' ?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re; Box

    When they come in bags.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    TPM, no need to fret for the Server racket...

    "the number of physical servers shipped each year could drop by half....installed base could compress by as many as 10 million machines...I am not hoping that this happens. Because it will really screw up the revenues and profits in the server racket."

    Don't fret...They'll do just fine -- they're selling Flash chips at 92% gross margins...

    Recently, Sun/Oracle did a payroll benchmark on quad-processor server with a $150K Flash SSD array attached (40 SSDs plus 12x15K HDDs for the redo-logs). Compared to an HP system with 58 disks and NO flash, the Sun system cost almost 3x more but produced only a 2.7% performance gain. This was on the Oracle PeopleSoft Payroll benchmark 9.0

    For this system, Sun is charging more than $2,000 for each 24GByte SSD module landed in the F5100 Flash array. That's about $110 worth of NAND Flash at current prices...

  7. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    @TeeCee

    I'm sure the El Reg legal department will welcome with wry smiles (and raised glasses) any attempt at likening the expression "apples to oranges" with any well-known (or not so well-known) maker of reassuringly expensive toys.

    I'm equally sure that they'll have all the living shit that is required to smother the ill-advised lawyers who would be daft enough to make such an attempt, and some to spare.

    Please do not let the Jobs Touch (c) extend beyond the reach of IT. The Jobsian Reality Distortion Field (c) does not have any effect in the courtroom.

    Not yet.

  8. tony trolle
    WTF?

    apples to oranges ?

    I thought it was apples to pears.........

    Tangerine Microtan 65 to Apple II makes a bit more sense (both 6502 chips...)

  9. jake Silver badge

    @AC 11:51 (was: Re; Box)

    "When they come in bags."

    The last four or five computers I built for friends and family were carried out of the store in bags. But I agree with your point. Computers have always been, and will always be, boxes.

    OK, maybe not always ... But we were calling VAXen components boxen in the mid-late 1970s.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Some day, my son, all this will be yours.

    Perhaps I have been in this business too long. I can remember the time in the 60s when we used a computer bureaux from a dumb terminal. You had a share of a HD and all the work was done on the server. Is this not virtualisation?

    Not only that but if we virtualise onto just 5 servers they will be truly huge; in fact they cannot be single machines but clusters with the works shared between many machines. But hang on a minute isn't that what we are doing now, almost? Perhaps what we need is a server that gathers resources from smaller machines (client?) and redistributes these according to demand. Er! cloud computing?

    As I said I have been in this business too long. Now where did I put that PDP11.

  11. Trevor 3
    Pint

    @AC 08:13

    errrm no, that was called thin client, sessioning, or a terminal session. That's not virtualisation.

    But yes, IT is moving in a big circle. We are going to see a return of the house sized servers, well, they will be made of blades, with feck off girt storage on the back of it. Then we'll see the return of dumb terminals, thin clients (chip pc's), virtual workstations etc... and millions of terminal services licenses.

    Unless we have a specific need for powerful desktops, an average netbook could do most business tasks, with an external monitor keyboard and mouse of course.

    I give it 5 years. then we'll have thin clients or virtual workstations, or terminal services for all.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    @trevor3 @AC08:13

    It depends on what that terminal is attached to. If you are talking the likes of an AS/400 type box it is virtualisation in the truest sense, multiple incidences of an OS running in comapartmentalised CPU and memory space. It's only the x86 architecture that has finally caught up with what the Unix big boys have been doing for years.

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