When Facebook Inc set out to build two new data centres, engineers couldn’t find the server computers they wanted from Dell Inc or Hewlett-Packard Co . They decided to build their own.
“We weren’t able to get exactly what we wanted,” Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware design, said at a conference on data-centre technology last month.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and companies that sell the computers off the shelf are losing sales in a key market because Facebook and larger rival Google Inc are leading a switch among internet companies to do-it-yourself servers. These customised machines now account for 20 per cent of the US market for servers, which generated $31.9 billion globally in last year, said Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Inc.
As sales of personal computers slump and consumers shift to tablets such as Apple Inc’s iPad, computer makers are becoming more dependent on servers. Dell and Hewlett-Packard lose out when they’re shunned by large customers such as Facebook, which are outfitting data centres with thousands of servers.
“It’s definitely a threat to the traditional business model,” said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist for researcher In-Stat in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Customers are finding solutions that the industry wasn’t ready to provide.”
