The server market is a multi-cylinder engine, with eight major hyperscalers and cloud builders all doing their thing almost independently of each other and of the economic conditions at large and the rest of the market being more subject to the waxing and waning of the economic tides. …
If you want to understand datacenter infrastructure and how the market for wares is changing, it helps to start with an absolute, top-down, all-encompassing view that brings together all server, storage, and switching revenues into a single bucket, eliminating the overlaps that occur when talking about these three different categories separately. …
Our increasingly networked and compute-intensive lives are driving the server business, and despite the cornucopia of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that spans the globe, the appetite for compute as expressed in shiny racks of servers or metal pizza boxes or an occasional tower sitting in a closet or under a desk continues despite the kind of consumption we have not seen since the dot-com boom. …
The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago. …
Sometimes, to get the proper perspective, you have to take the long view. …
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” …
The Great Infection is unique among recessions in that it is essentially a self-imposed economic downturn, not the result of over-exuberance or excess optimism or greed, but by a spikey ball of fat that is not alive but is more like a self-replicating biological machine that only knows how to do one thing: Copy itself if it reaches the right sticky environment in time before it dries out and falls apart. …
Excepting some potholes here and there and a few times when the hyperscalers and cloud builders tapped the brakes, it has been one hell of a run in the last decade for servers. …
With the dividing line between switching and routing blurring among the hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is no wonder to us that switching is growing as Ethernet switch ASICs get more and more routing functions and true Ethernet routing has remained more or less flat in the past five years. …
Server consumption is a pretty good proxy for how enterprises of all shapes and sizes feel about their particular business. …
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