Do you have particular insights into IBM's low end server business or is it because you use snapchat and have never used an IBM server?

Walk in to any datacenter. HP and Dell absolutely dominate. Third place is Sun. Fourth is Supermicro.

Very, very infrequently you'll see an old IBM server.

>Walk in to any datacenter. HP and Dell absolutely dominate. Third place is Sun. Fourth is Supermicro.

This is also what I thought. (though, places I've worked, ODMs and supermicros dominated, followed by dell, with hp dead last, but yeah, the quote from IBM never even made it to technical evaluation where I would see it.)

However, I went looking for a source[1] before I posted further up this thread. Apparently, IBM sells more servers than dell or hp (but not more than both put together)

Hm. reading further, I see numbers between 10% and 30% of IBM's server revenues being the high-end stuff they are keeping. So that could bump them below both dell and HP, in terms of just x86 servers, but even knocking 1/3rd off, they still sell a lot more x86 than I thought.

[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/08/29/ibm-regain...

I'm not sure where you make up your data from, but if that's the case, you might be going into a lot of low end data centers.

http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/idc-server-market-slowi...

Obviously my data is anecdotal, but I really haven't seen much IBM hardware deployed in communal datacentres (e.g. Peer1 or similar).

If IBM's selling that kind of volume, it could be to governments and other large enterprises with private datacentres.

Then again, that's revenue, so for every IBM server there could be five commodity Dell units in the rack and they'd have the same net cost.

This is true, and I believe you are exactly correct. IBM is catering to private data centers and not ones that you or I would be renting a rack in.

iDataPlex clusters are somewhat more common in HPC environemnts. They are x86-based.

I evaluated using their servers and saw nothing special at all in the market place from IBM. I see Snapchat as something special.

Snapchat is an entertainment product. It could go away tomorrow and the world would be just fine. On the other hand, losing all our server products would be catastrophic. Fortunately, this will never happen because servers are important. Should they become scarce, they would quickly become a very lucrative business resulting in an increasing supply.

IBMs servers may not be as good as the competition, but to compare them to an entertainment product is silly.

That's ridiculous - you just said "Snapchat is an entertainment product, it could go away tomorrow and the world would be just fine" - IBM's servers could go away tomorrow and the world would ALSO be just fine - unless you LITERALLY mean they disappear without time to replace or back them up, but I don't think that's your point.

If ALL Entertainment products were gone tomorrow, the world would NOT be just fine it would be SHIT. Just like if ALL servers went away, which is what you jumped to.

Snapchat, incidentally, is not an entertainment product anymore than texting is an entertainment product. It's an entertaining communication product.

You can easily replace an IBM server with any other comparable x86 machine. You can't easily replace Snapchat and the user networks it hosts with another similar service.

My point is that as a class of product, Snapchat could disappear and not be replaced and no critical infrastructure would halt nor any innovation or science be stopped. At worst you would have some grumpy people.

It's silly to compare this to a product class that is crucial to our society and claim that it is better. The relative worth of one server to another is one thing, but the class of server products is infinitely more important than the class social picture sharing products.

Would you also say Facebook could disappear tomorrow without "any innovation or science be stopped" ? That seems like a silly way of determining if something has value or not.

I'm not immersed in either business but I think you're making your argument too black-and-white. Snapchat is doing something valuable (I don't exactly know what) but I do not think it's better than what IBM is doing, IBM has been a powerful innovator in the computing industry for a long time and there's a lot of infrastructure powered by IBM's technology, even indirectly. I'm sure Snapchat is indirectly influenced by IBM - so writing either one off as better or worse is silly I think.

Different? Definitely. Providing value in totally different but important wasy? I'm sure. Again, I don't know either business in or out so these are more musings than battle-won opinions.

Solid point