Wintel servers gain favor in cloud era, putting RISC at risk

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Ed Scannell.

As IT professionals retool their data centers to accommodate more sophisticated cloud computing environments, many lean toward a scale-out strategy built on Wintel server hardware, steering away from proprietary, scale-up servers.  This means trouble for Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) and IBM’s RISC-based systems — as both companies are working to reinvent their server roadmaps.

The primary reasons driving IT pros toward Wintel are costs, both upfront and hidden, and the risk of moving to a new platform and dealing with a new vendor that a data center team may not be familiar with…

"We looked at other [proprietary systems] and the cost of their hardware was significantly more expensive than what we had," said David Chivers, vice president and chief information officer of VSE Corp., a federal contractor in Alexandria, Va., and who remained with Wintel servers when he started up a new data center. "We felt we weren’t getting as much bang for the buck."…

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