Sunday, January 15, 2006

IBM Gone Wild

IBM, whose commercials are so 'sophisticated' they usually forget to tell customers what they are selling, is advertising a new line of servers. At first they lament on how most businesses have at least one room called a server graveyard:
Its a valid concern: the accumulation over time of servers that take up space, even though each server promised to be the last your business would ever need. So what does IBM suggest? Anser: buy a server that is the SIZE OF A FRIDGE which--not surprisingly--promises to be the last you'll ever need.


I can see it now. Two years from now, IBM will have a new ad campaign depicting graveyards of fridge-sized servers. Apparently Big Blue thinks we've gone mad.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think these are great ads.

Anonymous said...

The "refrigerator" you refer to is simply a network rack, which anyone involved in IT should recognize. The BladeCenter, which is not shown clearly, is a chassis that lets you put up to 14 servers into it. This works out to 84 servers per "refrigerator", to use terminology you understand.

Anyway, I hate the ads personally. Like you I don't think they clearly communicate what is being sold or the reasons for it. I have a BladeCenter that runs about 80% of our mission critical applications and I love the technology. I just hate the ads for it.

A.H. Rajani said...

charles,

i understand the bladecenter architecture just fine -- we had one at work over the summer. it's not that i don't recognize what IBM is selling, or that i'm a non IT guy -- it's more that IBM fails to recognize the stupidity of the argument that this rack will solve the clutter problem.

servers get outdated fast and applications become more and more demanding. there's no reason to think that this trend will somehow stop over the next few years and there's just no reason to think that the bladecenter won't become outdated. the difference now is that once the bladecenter is outdated, you have something the size of a fridge to move out.