Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) Servers: Effects of Disaggregation

Continuing from the previous week, let us explore today, why the need for simplified COTS servers came into being.

There’s no official data on how many servers there are in Google data centers, but Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. This number, of course, is always changing as the company expands capacity and refreshes its hardware.

On the contrary, even the largest telco’s have been getting out of the data center business, please read here. Verizon sold to Equinix and AT&T sold to Brookfield. Winning a share of the cloud services market has become harder and harder for companies other than giants like AWS, Microsft etc.

And the largest data centers these operators built were a fraction of the size of what Google, AWS etc have been building. The traditional Operators used high availability, specifically designed servers for the telco business because they had the mission-critical services riding over these servers and highly important customer data on them. They bought costly servers like IBM, Dell, and HP.

Google with the scale of servers it wanted, could not afford the high cost. A couple of decades ago, Google started designing its own servers and then turned the hardware world on its head when it started building its own servers in tandem with various manufacturers in Taiwan and China. Google’s move was so successful, others followed, including Amazon and Facebook.

They needed cheaper hardware, so they disaggregated the OS and the Server, they release the specs of the hardware required and asked manufacturers to compete for high volume orders. The manufacturers then used the Google standard to offer the same configuration to the world, including Google’s Rivals. Since the servers are being consumed faster than the bread, so to say, it did not take long for this to become an industry practice. Thus the COTS came into being.

But Google also needed cheaper OS and Controllers, and we will explore what they did in that space next week. so stay tuned.