Cloud and Fusion Systems thriving

The server hardware system is sending a mixed message. On the one hand, investment in data center servers remains high and sales continue to climb. However, virtualization, cloud computing and fusion systems force companies to look at server hardware and focus on other computing components. As a result, the server's future seems blurry.

Sales of data center servers continue to rise. Gartner, a market-research firm, said server shipments increased 3.6% in the third quarter of 2012, with 12.6 billion dollars in operations for these devices.

There are several big reasons for growth. Companies continue to invest in IT solutions to operate and upgrade their business. So the company extends existing applications to new mobile devices and social networking systems, such as Facebook and Twitter.

"Companies with legacy enterprise applications and databases still buy stand-alone servers for compatibility, performance, resiliency, compliance and control," says John Abbott, chief analyst at 451 study. ”

At the same time, new high-performance applications are emerging.

Sam Barnett, the Infonetics data center and Cloud's guidance analyst, says big data is the driving force behind the need to drive more server processing functionality.

Companies collect large amounts of data and then rely on high-performance hardware analysis trends and then improve their operational efficiencies.

In response, server vendors provide a range of scenarios for increasing market share. HP's ProLiant SL4500 server, for example, can handle 240TB on a 4.3U server rack and can scale to nine rack configurations to achieve overall 2.16PB capacity.

The presence of large data applications underscores another driver. "One of the big highlights of the server market is the data center server, which has a double digit growth."

As data center consolidation and cloud computing prevail, information becomes more concentrated. Instead of distributing data from the departmental level, the company implements centralized control. As a result, central data centers are growing larger, requiring stronger servers and smaller remote centers. Gartner found that in 2010, 2% of the world's data centers accounted for 52% of the data center area and 63% of the data center hardware overhead. By 2015, the data could rise to 60% data center area and 71% of datacenter hardware overhead.

The ripple effect is based on the growth of the x86 server. Marvell Business found that their earnings in the second quarter of 2012 grew by 13% compared with the second quarter of 2011. "Linux has become a viable low-cost server option for large enterprises," said Christian Perry, senior analyst at TBR. ”

Scalability was once a challenge for these servers, and things are changing now. In fact, the delivery of Intel's new Xeon Chip provides the company with sufficient processing power.

But there are new market challenges, the most obvious being the revenue from proprietary hardware. TBR found that revenues from these products fell by 5% in the second quarter. This is caused by a series of factors. As mentioned earlier, the growth of x86 servers is usually at the expense of proprietary schemes.

Similarly, the product lifecycle is an accomplice to declining sales. Perry said: "When a proprietary manufacturer is delivering a new generation of processors, the user will delay the hardware investment during that time." "Further, TBR expects products to be updated from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle to lay the groundwork for raising revenue for the proprietary server sector," he said.

Calculation mode transfer also affects server sales. Abbott says that through virtualization, organizations try to maximize the usage of existing hardware architectures. Virtualization, which emerged more than 10 years ago, improves hardware performance and reduces the number of physical servers purchased.

Cloud computing provides an outsourcing option for the business, reducing computational load and reducing the number of internal servers. In theory, it provides the business with the ability to reduce hardware costs and simplify operations.

However, the cloud is a broad term that has different dimensions in different segments of the market. Such as Amazon provides on-demand server resources are very popular in small and medium enterprises.

But large companies do not use these services, thinking they think it is a compromise on data integrity. Barnett said: "Look at the power outage, Amazon and Google suffered what, the enterprise can not afford such a long time of power outages." ”

Security is also a major concern. Many times, cloud vendors operate multi-tenant systems, so different companies share server resources. Because the information is not completely isolated, it is possible to be black.

For these limitations, large enterprises choose private cloud services rather than public clouds. If IBM tries to solve security problems, try to convince the corporate public cloud services are strong, secure, and can host critical applications. In the event of a problem, the independent market will suffer a heavy blow.

Unified computing systems have also been welcomed. Instead of fiddling with various components, the company buys integrated systems that provide server, storage, and networking capabilities. Cisco is doing well in this niche market. IBM and HP are also competing in this market.

Overall, the need for more computing resources continues, as the business deploys new large data applications and enhances existing systems. However, the days that these resources are driven by server hardware are fading away. Without stand-alone servers, companies use virtualization, cloud computing, and unified computing systems to solve problems.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)