[thrownaway2424]

Let's just remember that HP is led by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of large scale cloud computing:

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said. Whitman continued. "[But] right now, they're not building their own servers because they can't get the disk drives. So they're calling us...Yes, the Googles, the Facebooks are doing some of that, but I will tell you, they're all calling us right now because they don't have the ability to get the drives," she said, addressing the hard disk drive shortage that has resulted from the flooding in Thailand.

In the decades-long string of stupid things said by HP executives, this one stands out in my memory. Nobody from Facebook or Google considered for even a single nanosecond buying datacenter computers from HP.

[rstupek]

Actually at the time Facebook was buying a large number of servers from HP and having them built with Fusion IO drives for their database systems. Not sure when they scaled that back to their own custom built stuff.

[MichaelGG]

I don't understand. It sounds like she's just saying they are calling HP to buy drives for their own servers. Which easily may have been true right?

It doesn't sound like she's saying they're now buying HP servers.

[thrownaway2424]

No, I don't think it could easily have been true at all. Google puts the worst, cheapest drives they found on the side of the road in their servers. HP sells a 36GB SAS drive for $2000.