As for where exactly server spend is heading of late, Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner – responsible for the 2014 server market sales figures mentioned above – said in March that on a worldwide basis, “hyperscale data centre deployments, as well as service provider installations, drove the x86-based server market upward,” during 2014.
Sales figures from the report noted that in the final quarter of last year HP extended its revenue share lead in with the EMEA region with an impressive 10% growth though this period conversely saw a 1.5% decline in server shipments. “Dell held the second spot in EMEA as IBM’s divestment of x86 servers to Lenovo reduced IBM’s position to third,” added the report.
“A key factor in making a decision surrounding server investment is management tools to ensure that IT administrators have full access to the data and solutions on offer, while also coming with the added bonus of alert systems built into the server as standard both from onsite and also mobile enabled,” Martin Sinnott, Dell
Overall, Hewitt said, “Enterprises had less unit growth impact because of the ongoing presence of physical server consolidation through x86-server virtualisation. This overall market growth developed despite declines in both mainframe and Unix platforms.”
Lenovo’s place in the industry looks set to change in the near future though with vice president of Lenovo APAC enterprise business group, Kong Meng Koh, announcing in May 2015 that the company plans to take the number one global position in the server market over the next five years.
“We see, unlike many vendors out there, the server market has been a growth industry,” he said at the time. “There is a wave of [internet of things] IoT and cloud, and we will hit an accelerated adoption curve in those devices, and we think it will generate environments for servers and storage on the backend. We want to position ourselves for that growth when it happens.”
Faster speeds
One additional name in the market is that of Fujitsu and Paul Frost, channel manager with Fujtisu Ireland said that the company’s RX300’s have been “the mainstay” of its server base in Ireland for “a number of years due to its ability to be scaled to particular customer requirements.” However he said that with regards to his company the newer RX2540M1 has now superseded it. Frost said the RX2540M1, is a modular rack mounted 2U server “for both the standalone multi-function small business to the database, high virtualisation datacentre environments.”
Over at IBM meanwhile, Kelly said its VersaStack solution is “gaining a lot of traction” among Irish clients. It offers, he said, “the opportunity to deploy a scalable solution that gives you an agility that means you can attach any of over 300 different storage arrays.” Referring back to Gartner’s recent findings on the servers marketplace he noted that according to the research giants, “by the end of this year, 35% of total server shipped value will be as integrated solutions, demonstrates the market is moving in this direction.”
“Hyperscale data centre deployments, as well as service provider installations, drove the x86-based server market upward, during 2014,” Jeffrey Hewitt, Gartner
He noted too that figures from online technology community Wikibon claim that “by 2017, nearly two thirds of all enterprise application infrastructures will be packaged in the form of a converged solution.”
Modern workloads
Dell’s Sinnott said that a “wave of new, modern workloads” has been forcing companies to find a bridge between current infrastructure and future investment. Like Frost and Kelly, focusing on his own company’s offerings, he said, “By converging hardware, management and workloads, the Dell PowerEdge FX server solution allows customers to precisely tailor, quickly deploy and easily manage a diverse set of applications using a common set of modular IT building blocks.”
Sinnott added that as well as its FX range of servers, the Irish market has been attracted to the VRTX solution which integrates Dells modular servers “into a format that can be placed into any business or office and serve as a full data centre in a box with up to 24 shared hard drive and fully integrated switching fabric.”
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