Microsoft has released orders to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Taiwan-based Wiwynn for making servers for its Project Olympus, a next-generation hyperscale computing hardware design for cloud datacenters, according to industry sources.
At the OCP (Open Compute Project) US Summit 2017 held in early March, Microsoft unveiled its Project Olympus as a new model for open source hardware development, mainly adopting Intel's new generation Xeon Scalable processor, a new universal motherboard, and a new universal rack power distribution unit. The hardware focuses on modularity, cost and power efficiency, and global datacenter interoperability to facilitate wide applications and help industrial players explore business opportunities associated with AI (artificial intelligence) and big data analysis.
The sources said as one of Microsoft's main server suppliers, Dell has been ruled out as a supplier of Project Olympus servers, because after acquiring EMC, Dell has moved to deploy private clouds by integrating resources from virtualization software developer VMware, a re-investment of EMC, thus leading to possible competition against Microsoft.
The sources disclosed China-based Lenovo is also aggressively vying for similar orders from Microsoft, and is very likely to capture part of the orders in 2018. This is because Lenovo has contributed tremendous royalty payments to Microsoft for Windows operating systems, and therefore Microsoft will probably release some server orders to Lenovo, the sources added.
Lenovo actively shifting to datacenter server market
Lenovo is striving hard to shift its server business from the enterprise server market to the datacenter server market, as the former is shrinking at a faster pace than expected. Lenovo has suffered operating losses after acquiring IBM x86 server hardware business, which was originally designed to serve as a new tool for the China vendor to tap the enterprise server market but finally proved an operating burden on the vendor, according to industry sources.
Of the world's four major cloud service giants, Google, Amazon and Facebook maintain much less close ties with Lenovo than Microsoft does. As the second largest PC brand globally, Lenovo records 50-55 million units in annual shipments for a 20% share of the global market, making it a heavyweight partner of Microsoft in the PC sector. This is a major advantage Lenovo can leverage to win more datacenter server orders, the sources said.
The sources also disclosed that HPE has managed to win datacenter server orders from Microsoft due mainly to its cooperation with Foxconn to set up a joint venture for server production. Bu the JV has reportedly been quietly dissolved, and whether the dissolution will affect Microsoft's release of orders to HPE in the coming year remains to be observed.
Article translated by Willis Ke
