[mkozlows]

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers:

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n...

That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So they've developed their own custom stuff (often built on open source; sometimes open sourced back out) that works a lot better while also being massively cheaper.

AWS isn't just a bunch of Dell servers hooked up to EMC SANs and Cisco switches. The only people who still use that stuff are people who a) have a ton of money and a desire to spend it freely, plus b) don't have really serious demands, which would mandate something better.

That's not a good place to be.

[mrweasel]

There's still going to be a large number of small companies that will be needing servers. There might be so many hardware providers as is, but you can't blame Dell for attempting to be the last man standing.

Similarly with Cisco, you can run the internet exchange of a small country on a single stock Cisco switch, and many do. Cisco isn't going anywhere in the near future. Amazon, Google and Facebook might not have a need for them, but thousand of other companies do, even large datacenters.

[manigandham]

Facebook, Google, Amazon (while big) are nowhere near the majority of the servers used in the world.

[a3voices]

Are you sure? Internet traffic follows a power law distribution.

[manigandham]

Yes. What does internet traffic have to do with it?

There are millions of SMBs and tens of thousands of large corporations around the world that own server hardware. A tiny percent of that is the major internet companies.

The designs for hardware are changing but the providers are still going to be the usual companies that are good at this and have all the manufacturing in place. For example a lot of banks have started to switch to Open-Compute designs [1] but they will still buy these from Dell or HP.

Software is a different story.

1. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/03/11/open-...

[noir_lord]

Oth there are thousands (probably millions) of companies out there where cisco kit would be just fine.

Very few companies have the kind of network requirements of Facebook or Google.

[mkozlows]

So the thing is, yes, that's true. Lots of companies can get by with Cisco/Dell/EMC stuff and don't need the ultra-high-end datacenters of Amazon/Google.

And if Cisco/Dell/EMC stuff was bargain-priced and the ultra-high-end stuff was expensive, well, there you go.

But the problem is, if you want your stuff hosted on Amazon-class hardware/network topologies, it's really cheap to do so with AWS (or Azure, or whatever). And the Cisco/Dell/EMC stuff is painfully, ruinously expensive.

If the high-end thing is also the cheap thing, what's the rationale for buying the low-end, expensive thing?

[noir_lord]

Not denying the cost of AWS (I priced out S3 the other day and it's amazingly cheap) however there legitimate business cases where companies won't put data in the cloud (and in fact I've found more clients are asking about those in light of the press around Snowden/NSA/GCHQ).

[clavalle]

In a word? Control.

[tw04]

*in their clouds. They still use traditional networking and servers on campus.