Servers are engines that power enterprises big or small. They come in
different shapes and sizes, and in terms of technology have come a long way.
Servers are classified according to their architecture, for instance, x86 or
RISC servers. According to IDC's Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server
Tracker, Q2 2007 release, the Indian server market grew by 30% y-o-y to touch
$169 mn (Rs 698 crore) revenues. This was the second consecutive quarter when
the unit shipments grew by approximately 12% over the previous quarter.
The unit shipments increase in the India server market is mainly driven by
the expansion of new distributed computing workload deployments across key
segments. If we look at the latest available statistics by IDC, the overall
India server market shipments during Q2 2007 aggregated to 35,615 units. HP
emerged as the leader both in terms of factory revenues as well as unit
shipments during Q2 2007, followed by IBM.
The x86 Market
The x86 servers, which constitute the largest chunk of the server pie in
terms of volume, have undergone a sea change. With the advent of multi-core
processors, the x86 markets, during 2007, have totally become 64-bit. During FY
'07, the x86 market shipments stood at 107,244 units. If we look at Q2 2007, the
India x86 server market performed very well across the financial, infrastructure
and distribution services, and manufacturing sectors, clocking revenues of
nearly $108 mn (Rs 445 crore), which correspond to 33,323 unit shipments. HP
held on to its number one position in this segment both in unit shipments and
factory revenue terms, followed by IBM and Dell.
If we look at the vendor-wise performance, HP's dominance in the server space
continues. Its x86 servers on the ProLiant series saw good traction across
verticals. HP also had large x86 cluster deployments and brought x86 in the high
performance computing space. A significant deployment for HP here was the
deployment of the supercomputer at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL),
a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. This CRL supercomputer includes nodes
and racks built by HP (HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system), which uses
high-speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel.
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Meanwhile, IBM focused on the System x servers with embedded virtualization
technology and the company's latest chipset for Intel's quad-core Xeon
processors. IBM's upcoming System x3950 M2 server will include X4, the
fourth-generation IBM's chipset for x86 servers. In addition, the new system
will debut an embedded hypervisor-virtualization platform for running multiple
operating systems on a host computer at the same time.
Besides performance enhancements and processing efficiencies, X4 is said to
enable better server configurations geared toward virtualization. In addition,
the System x3950 includes an internal USB interface that connects the server's
virtualization software to the chipset. The software is preloaded on a 4 Gb USB
flash memory device and offers double the memory slot capacity of its previous
version. As a result, the x3950 has four times the amount of memory for handling
more virtualization workloads.
Sun Microsystems, on the other hand, aggressively tapped into the market with
a slew of offerings. The company introduced its first quad-core x64 (x86,
64-bit) systems, including the world's smallest four-socket x64 server, which
delivers up to twice the expandability and compute power as other servers, yet
is half the size. The Sun Fire X4450 and X4150 servers, powered by Quad-Core
Intel Xeon processors, enable customers to solve critical problems in the data
center by offering more performance, higher density, and better power efficiency
than competitive systems in the market today, claims Sun. Both servers also give
customers a choice of operating systems running the Solaris Operating System,
Windows, Linux, or VMware, with the flexibility to deploy a broad range of
applications.
Meanwhile, Indian vendors like Wipro and HCL also had a good run on the
server space. For instance, Wipro has its servers like NetPower 1U and 2U
rack-based servers best designed to suit the requirements of SMB and SME. The
company pitched it on data centers.
Unix Servers
Despite its uniqueness and stiff competition from the x86 servers, the Unix
market has performed well, mainly due to processors becoming multi-core. But
mission critical apps on the core banking side continue to be Unix's domain.
Telecom also drove the Unix numbers, and since last year, the Unix TCO is also
coming down, making even SMB's adopt Unix. Moreover, Unix also became open and
paved the way for running other operating systems in addition to Unix.
The India non-x86/Unix server market has seen phenomenal growth across
various verticals, mainly financial services, infrastructure services and
distribution services, clocking nearly $55 mn (Rs 227 crore) corresponding to
2,246 units during Q2 2007. Sun Microsystems was the market leader in the
non-x86/Unix server segment both in terms of unit shipments as well factory
revenues, followed by IBM and HP.
In the vendor-wise performance, Sun dominates. For more than six years in a
row, Sun has been the leader in the non x86/Unix market. As per the IDC's
report, Sun earned a leadership position in the non-x86/Unix server market in Q2
2007 in India, with a 60.1% market share in unit terms and 46.6% market share in
revenue terms during Q2 2007. In the non-x86/Unix server segment in India, Sun
was the only vendor whose revenue share increased on a q-o-q basis (Q2 2007 over
Q1 2007). Sun server shipments grew the fastest in the high-end and volume
server segments of the non-x86/Unix server market in India during Q2 2007 on a
q-o-q basis (Q2 2007 over Q1 2007).
Meanwhile, the escalation of HP is also impressive in the Unix space with big
deployments across all leading verticals. Its strength came from its 9000 server
family featuring high computing with the HP PA-8900 processors and mission
critical capabilities with its UX 11i operating system. HP also launched the new
mid-range and Superdome systems, with the HP sx2000 chipset aimed at higher
availability and performance at a lower TCO.
On IBM's part, it attacked the market with its POWER6 systems, which is said
to be the fastest processor in the Unix range in India and will see a great leap
in adoption. IBM's investment in innovation for Unix servers with its latest
POWER6-based systems continues to drive growth in this important part of the
industry.
IBM's consistent delivery of POWER processor-based systems offers leadership
performance and modular designs that grow easily with workload needs. This
performance assurance gives the ability to focus on business innovation without
being slowed down by the capability and flexibility of your IT infrastructure.
Blade Servers
The escalation of blades in recent times have been pretty impressive.
Experts say that it is changing the very personality of data centers. Blades
assume significance in the data center environment because it brings down server
footprint that, in turn, will simplify server management. Moreover, from a
functional perspective, blades provide more functionality and greater density as
compared to conventional servers. If we look at typical data centers, one
primarily challenge is the processing power required for managing compute
intensive applications, so the infrastructure has to be such that it can take
unscheduled load patters, typically in a blade environment. Simply by adding
more blades one will be able to meet those demands.
Blades bring in a highly scaleable and agile computing infrastructure that
can be configured as per load patterns. As computing options continue to grow in
the industry standard computing market, the emphasis is more on scale up versus
scale out. Scaling up means adding additional computing power through
processors, memory and I/O, thereby increasing a system's computing power and
making it highly available and reliable for that particular task. Meanwhile,
scale out is nothing but stepping down the computing power as that particular
task does not require set configurations. Clearly, scaling up and scaling down
is a key deliverable of blade servers, as it makes easier for the physical
consolidation of the server environment.
According to IDC India, “With increased consciousness and awareness about
cooling and power management and infrastructure costs, blade servers are
witnessing definitive acceptability among CIOs. As per IDC, the India x86 blade
server market was close to 6% of the total x86 server markets (in unit shipment
terms) in FY '07. This is expected to go up to 11% in FY '08. After penetrating
into large enterprises through some big deals and creating a lot of favorable
noise about the advantages of blades, MNC server vendors are now focusing on the
SMB segment for continued and sustained growth of blade servers. Vendors are
also launching new models to cater to the specific needs of the SMB segment.
If we look vendor-wise, HP indeed has come a long way on blades and its
escalation has been very rapid since 2002. From Quick Blades to the Blade
System, HP has pushed more and more blades in the market. In the Indian context
also, HP has had a good traction on blades. Its strategy has been two fold; one,
blade as a data center and two, blade as servers. But HP has been aggressively
targeting the data center space, which consumes majority of these servers.
The blades market is doing exceedingly well as vendors are focusing on more
specific products for the SMB, breaking the myth that blades are just for large
enterprises. Due to this, the penetration of blades will witness a steeper
growth. Factors such as the growth in the small and medium business and the need
for companies to lower the TCO, as blades are easy to manage, virtualize and
scale up, have also attributed to this growth. They are excellent for power
consumption and they have internal storage as well.
If we look at IBM, it intends to make its blades servers more attractive to
SMB customers and help its business partners target those users. Until recently,
IBM predominantly aimed its BladeCenter blades at large enterprises but now the
focus has been the SMB as well. SMBs tends to have a lot of computers and often
buy a machine to do a specific job within their operation. Being able to use
blades within a chassis, instead of a number of individual machines, can make
life easier for small businesses. The fact that blades house both servers as
well as storage is an excellent option for them.
IBM is working on to bring innovative versions of blade technology with
relatively cooling and power experience and this has been our primarily focus.
IBM System x and BladeCenter servers start with the Calibrated Vectored Cooling
technology, which allows dual paths of air to each component, improving uptime
and longevity, and reducing wasteful air movement and heat generation. Coupled
with more energy-efficient power supplies, the IBM BladeCenter and System x
servers can generate less heat in the critical AC-to-DC power conversion than
many alternative systems from the competition. BladeCenter servers, with the IBM
X-Architecture technology, can enable you to pack more processors into the same
power and cooling envelope as well as better utilize your floor space to “right
size” the data center design.
The growth in shipments of blade servers can be attributed to an increased
awareness among CIOs about the power consumption and space issues of data
centers. New products and technologies are also being launched in this space,
which is increasing creating awareness among users. For instance, Sun recently
launched its Sun Blade 6000 series. With superior, no compromise features
brought in Sun's Sun Blade 6000, we expect customers to deploy blades across
their computing tiers, including mission critical applications. Experts say that
just as rack servers gradually supplanted tower servers, we expect blade servers
to supersede rack servers over the next three to four years.
Outlook
Servers, whether x86 or Unix, or tower or blades, are undergoing a sea
change in terms of power and performance. As applications become more demanding,
vendors need to come out with servers that can compute intensive tasks faster.
The consumer today has got huge options whether it is AMD or Intel. The emphasis
is more performance per rupee spent on the server. Hence, server RoI, both
tangible as well as intangible, will be closely scrutinized by the enterprises.
Another trend that is gaining ground on the data center environment is green
computing, and vendors are making concerted efforts to arrive at peak computing
at lesser power consumption and lesser heat.
Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in
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