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Chapter 5 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 207

COMPUTER HARDWARE PLATFORMS
Firms worldwide are expected to spend $448 billion on computer hardware
in 2013, including servers and client devices. The server market uses mostly
Intel or AMD processors in the form of blade servers in racks, but also includes
Sun SPARC microprocessors and IBM chips specially designed for server use.
Blade servers, which we discussed in the chapter-opening case, are computers
consisting of a circuit board with processors, memory, and network connec-
tions that are stored in racks. They take up less space than traditional box-based
servers. Secondary storage may be provided by a hard drive in each blade server
or by external mass-storage drives.
The marketplace for computer hardware has increasingly become concen-
trated in top firms such as IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun Microsystems (acquired
by Oracle), and three chip producers: Intel, AMD, and IBM. The industry has
collectively settled on Intel as the standard processor for business comput-
ing, with major exceptions in the server market for Unix and Linux machines,
which might use Sun or IBM processors.
Mainframes have not disappeared. Mainframes continue to be used to
reliably and securely handle huge volumes of transactions, for analyzing very
large quantities of data, and for handling large workloads in cloud computing
centers. The mainframe is still the digital workhorse for banking and telecom-
munications networks. However, the number of providers has dwindled to one:
IBM. IBM has also repurposed its mainframe systems so they can be used as
giant servers for massive enterprise networks and corporate Web sites. A single
IBM mainframe can run up to 17,000 instances of Linux or Windows Server
software and is capable of replacing thousands of smaller blade servers (see the
discussion of virtualization in Section 5.3).

OPERATING SYSTEM PLATFORMS

Microsoft Windows Server comprises about 35 percent of the server operating
system market, with 65 percent of corporate servers using some form of the
Unix operating system or Linux, an inexpensive and robust open source
relative of Unix. Microsoft Windows Server is capable of providing enterprise-
wide operating system and network services, and appeals to organizations
seeking Windows-based IT infrastructures.
Unix and Linux are scalable, reliable, and much less expensive than
mainframe operating systems. They can also run on many different types of
processors. The major providers of Unix operating systems are IBM, HP, and
Sun, each with slightly different and partially incompatible versions.
At the client level, 90 percent of PCs use some form of the Microsoft Windows
operating system (such as Windows 8, Windows 7, or Windows Vista) to manage
the resources and activities of the computer. However, there is now a much
greater variety of operating systems than in the past, with new operating systems
for computing on handheld mobile digital devices or cloud-connected computers.
Google’s Chrome OS provides a lightweight operating system for cloud
computing using netbooks. Programs are not stored on the user’s PC but are
used over the Internet and accessed through the Chrome Web browser. User
data reside on servers across the Internet. Android is an open source operating
system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers devel-
oped by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. It has become the most
popular smartphone platform worldwide, competing with iOS, Apple's mobile
operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

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