| Key trends in server market
4 January, 2006
By Chris Talbot
One important trend in the surging server market is the move
towards solution-oriented purchases, said Dave Williams, business
development executive for server and storage brands at IBM
Canada.
"There continues to be a strong solution orientation
for our customers," Williams said. "They want to
buy solutions. In this case, they want to buy business solutions
and infrastructure solutions." This theme will continue
through 2006, he said.
There is also strong momentum in the SMB market segment,
Williams said. Server consolidation was once mainly an enterprise
concern, but now that concern also belongs to SMBs.
"Small and medium business customers are looking to
take 20 servers down to five servers, so the virtualization
and the technology associated with that has moved downmarket,"
Williams said.
Richard McCormack, senior vice president of Fujitsu said,
"It was very clear that [customers] see virtualization
as one of the hot topics for 2006."
"Server virtualization is absolutely going to remain
a hot topic ... but perhaps a new hot topic in 2006 is that
combination of server and storage virtualization," he
added.
However, before customers can become comfortable in deploying
virtualization technologies, middleware needs extra functionality
to help manage it, McCormack said.
"We are seeing a lot more customers wanting entire systems
to be provided than going to separate vendors and buying piece
parts. And I think that's really a reflection of C-level executives
wanting vendors to take more responsibility for interoperability
and providing them with working, functional, complete systems
instead of having their staff doing the work," McCormack
said.
The SMB market segment represents the biggest area for growth,
and there is an opportunity for vendors and channel partners
within that market, Williams said.
"SMB for us represents a real opportunity, as well as
for our channel partners," Williams said.
With customers focusing on a solutions orientation, though,
partners are going to need to invest in the ability to provide
services they can wrap around the technology if they want
to be successful, Williams said.
"I think any channel partner that's too dependent on
just the technology part is going to struggle relative to
one that has a strong solutions and services orientation,"
Williams said.
However, customers are also looking for strong interoperability,
McCormack said.
"The partners can integrate that and be the glue to
pull all this together for the customer," said Steve
Shaw, business critical systems product manager for HP Canada.
Another growth area is blade servers. According to Imex Research,
the integrated modular architecture of blade systems providing
virtualization, provisioning and self-driven automation capabilities
already are starting to strike a pleasant chord with CIOs.
It expects factory revenues to reach $24 billion by 2008,
representing 9 million units.
Some of the major growth drivers accelerating the adoption
of blade servers include Unix to Linux migrations to leverage
cost effectiveness of open source Linux. HPC Linux Clusters
have fueled an explosive growth in academia and national laboratories
for scientific computing and are migrating to the commercial
world for bio-informatics, Wall Street decision support financials,
medical visualization, and other applications.
Another driver is server consolidation onto fewer servers
with virtualization of resources, provisioning and lights
out automation capabilities. And greater blades density will
provide economic benefits in real estate and operational metrics.
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