One third of servers, storage and switches are sold to clouds

Analyst firm IDC reckons that cloud operations – private and public - now account for “almost a third” of the world's spending on servers, storage and ethernet switches.

The overall cloud market, the firm says, is about US$6.5bn a quarter, with public clouds accounting for about half of that.

IDC's definition for public clouds is nice and tight. It says they are “... open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.” The firm's language for private clouds is a little looser, as it reckons they are “shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise.” That wording leaves a bit of room for a private cloud to include that lone tower server out in a branch office running vSphere or Hyper-V.

Even if the private cloud definition looks a bit flabby, that still leaves us with public clouds spending about US$13 Billion a year on kit. And according to some estimates` your correspondent has encountered, public clouds account for about five per cent of all workloads.

We ain't seen nothing yet. ®

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