Some, like Dell, Oracle, Apple, and HP are in the hardware design business so no surprises there, others like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have such large hardware needs that a significant amount of cost can be recovered by doing so, and others such as the wall street companies have specialized needs so it makes sense for them as well.
I was asked about custom hardware in an interview once and pointed out that it was pretty straight forward to go to a PC original device manufacturer (ODM) or OEM and say "I'd like an x86 architecture box that has these features ..." and get it built. The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.
The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.
And unfortunately there's still zero public information on that side of the equation, even from the Open Compute Project. I wonder how many customers are missing out because they don't even know to ask.
Can you say more about this? There is a lot of information about infrastructure costs. Put 'operations decision maker' on your business card and folks who want to share that information with you sort of ooze out of the woodwork :-)
You can 'save' anywhere from 10 to 35 percent on the cost of your computing infrastructure with some investment in customization. This is a combined OpEx + CapEx number since you benefit both from staff costs. Example: If its easier to get a machine back into service for your staff they spend less time on it so they cost less (OpEx) if you've got a larger cabinet that is holding all your machines you don't need individual chassis for each machine so they cost less to produce (CapEx).
For folks for whom their 'data processing' infrastructure is small part of their overall costs it isn't worth it but for companies that live and die on the marginal cost of one more user it's pretty critical stuff to know.
...folks who want to share that information with you sort of ooze out of the woodwork
Yeah, that was my impression. IOW, you can't find out anything unless you're actually buying. I don't have the budget for any of this stuff; I am just curious so I've looked around the Web and found no hard numbers.
I was asked about custom hardware in an interview once and pointed out that it was pretty straight forward to go to a PC original device manufacturer (ODM) or OEM and say "I'd like an x86 architecture box that has these features ..." and get it built. The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.