Facebook's Open Compute could make DIY data centres feasible

A circle with you in the middle

Hardware vendors won't survive that level of commoditisation. They need margins to keep shareholders happy, buy executive yachts and keep up the completely unrealistic double-digit annual growth that Wall Street demands. As soon as any of the hardware-sales-reliant big names start posting consistent revenue declines, they'll enter a death spiral and evaporate.

Selling the hardware departments to China, as IBM has done with its x86 commodity line, will only delay this for a few years. Manufacturers in China can show growth by taking customers away from the US makers, but very soon here those US suppliers will no longer be selling hardware. Then the OEMs in China will have to compete among themselves. That battle will be vicious and there will be casualties.

Market consolidation will occur and the handful of survivors will collectively – but not together, if you know what I mean, anti-trust investigators – put up prices. This will put pressure on the software side of the equation (which is where all the margin will be, and what all US companies will peddle,) and we'll start the dance anew.

DIY versus COTS is an old, old debate. There is no one answer to this that will apply to all businesses. It is, however, worth taking the time to think beyond this refresh cycle and beyond just the hardware.

Data centres are about managing the life cycle of your hardware and your software in unison. You need good supply chains for both, confidence in the goods sold by your vendors and in the viability of those vendors over time.

Next, The Reg will look at how even choices on something as small as a network can impact the design of your data centre. ®