Kinsella meanwhile said that Irish businesses are “still heavily invested in the HP ProLiant ranges.” Though he noted that more recent Gen9 models “provide faster speeds with the same footprint and better integration for management tools.” HP’s central management system OneView, he continued, is becoming increasingly popular among Irish businesses “as it allows administrators more central control over the ever growing number of systems that organisations are deploying.”
Future
Looking ahead to where clients may push their spend over the coming 18 months, Sinnott felt that with the emergence of software defined enterprise (SDE), “the server has moved back into the main part of the data centre again.” Expanding on his point, he continued, “The web-scale technology which has been used by all the major IT providers is now becoming available to the mainstream IT industry, this means the server or a group of servers can now act as the full datacentre thus replacing the need for traditional server area network (SAN) based architecture.”
“The RX300 has been the mainstay of the Fujitsu server base in Ireland for a number of years, but is now superseded by modular systems for both multi-function in small business, databases and high virtualisation datacentre environments,” Paul Frost, Fujitsu
Datapac’s Kinsella commented that, as computer demand increases, Irish business are looking for options that can hit that well-worn target of fitting ‘more into less’. “Servers offering consolidated approaches are being looked at more seriously,” he said, adding that in the past blade servers and virtualisation filled this void. However, he added, “the requirements for virtual desktops will continue to push a number of systems to the fore which can provide a smaller denser footprint and lower energy costs.”
For IBM Ireland’s Kelly the focus of the future for the servers industry is intertwined with open source cloud computing platform OpenStack and the application portability-focused container technology, Docker, which of course is also open source.
Openstack
“OpenStack is a key determinant in server space,” Kelly said. “The OpenStack cloud operating system can control large groups of servers, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre and it is designed for scalability, so businesses can easily add new computer and storage resources to grow their cloud computing solution over time. OpenStack is designed to be massively horizontally scalable, which allows all services to be distributed widely.”
As a result, Kelly continued, “a storage-focused OpenStack design architecture server hardware selection allows businesses are able to focus on a ‘scale up’ versus ‘scale out’ solution.” As for Docker, Kelly was keen to talk about what it offers in terms of providing a way to package an application in a virtual container so that it can be run across different distributions.
“Docker helps system administrators deploy and run any app on any infrastructure, quickly and reliably,” he said. “It enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result IT administrators can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data centre and any cloud — without the ‘well it runs on this machine’ finger pointing approach.”
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