Dear Mary:
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<<<Most went to IO processors, memory, disk, printers, tape libraries, and infrastructure. One year of maintenance was buried in the contract as the warranty. The ongoing 24-7 maintenance was about 50% of the cost annually.>>>
I am not absolutely certain, but I don't think most of what you describe above goes into what the industry include as part of their server revenue projections.
Most often, these sales are not made directly through the manufacturer (with the exception of IBM) and the integrator and/or manufactory may bundle some of their sales. However, I don't think that is the way the computer industry report server sales. (If you have sources to the countrary, I then need to be corrected)
"
Well Mary, get an estimate for the installation of an IBM 3090 mainframe. For your information a "frame" is a place that holds a number of "drawers" of various heights. In a "drawer" is the main CPU boxes which contain the CPU chips themselves (in MCM (Multi Chip Modules)), logic like for power on, reset, and various clocks, bus drivers, boards, power supplies, microcode PROMs, etc., and lots of main memory (not unusual to have 8 to 16 channels of 4 boards (sometimes DIMMs) each). In other drawers are backplanes (essentially buses that you plug things into (generally vertically mounted because air is blown from the bottom of the cabinet to the top)) filled with IO controllers, disk controllers, tape system controllers, communication adapters, etc. Other drawers are filled with disk drive arrays, some with redundant power supplies, some with tape drives (whether open reel (getting rare now or the various cartridge formats), and even cable patch panels.
All in all a lot of different equipment that is included in a typical server sales contract. In addition, maintenance is also typically also included for the life of the system especially if it is to be leased. This all goes into that server sales number you state. The various OEMs may lump all of this into one division or split it up into the various divisions responsible but the aggregate is called server revenue. Services are things like figuring what is needed to do a task, what software to buy, what hardware to buy, how to connect the various pieces together, integrating the software, the hardware, and the business systems into one seamless whole, and lastly figuring what went wrong and fixing it. If the disk drive died, the call to the hardware maintenance and what they do is not included, but reloading the data onto that drive or resynching the datasets on that drive are. Since the software is now much more expensive than the hardware, and the effort required to "syncronize" the overall system to the business quite large, this services revenue number typically contains most of the profit (and loss sometimes). Hey "handholding" is expensive and quite lucrative as well.
All in all, the numbers of PCs acting as servers is skyrocketing and that is where almost all of the expansion in the "server" market is. Quad 15K disks, twin channel scsi controllers, quad port NICs, 2GB memory, redundant power supplies, server rack case, cabling, the OS installed, and the racks themselves can easily be 10x the cost of the CPUs used (If you include the RDBMS software, it becomes more like 5% or less (Oracle is expensive)). And that is where the CPU is the highest percentage in any server. As the size goes up, the CPU's portion shrinks. Unfortunately for Intel, this is where they are beginning to lose market share.
Pete |
