The server market in India has always been dynamic and brewing with changes prompted by the emergence of new technologies. In 2014, there has been a greater need for integration, efficiency, automation, consolidation and reduced costs across verticals. Due to a complete shift in densification of servers, workloads and investments in data analytics and web applications, the server industry in specific has been most impacted.
Indian enterprises will be focusing on building intelligent data centers that focus on optimizing existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities. An increasing number of organisations are eying cloud as a replacement to traditional servers, storage, and other hardware to save on their capital expenditures (CAPEX).
With this the server landscape is changing significantly, resulting in partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s X86 server division and VMware’s acquisition of Nicira to come up with new architectures for servers and networking equipment are some indications of the prevailing transformation in the server industry.
Traditional server manufactures like Intel and AMD are now focussing on offerings which are built for specific usage for efficient utilization of energy. The demand for mobile, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) workloads are also fuelling the market for Micro Servers.
Greyhound Research believes that the following trends will influence the server market in the coming years-:
Evolution of Micro Servers for specific requirements. Energy efficiency and compact sizing are the key reasons which will make Micro Servers a suitable option for operations like serving small, static HTML pages. Greyhound Research believes that with persistent innovations in 64 bit ARM and x86 technologies, the adoption of Micro servers will increase in the next 3 – 5 years. The demand for Micro servers will also come from SMBs which do not require a tower server.
Flash Storage to gain popularity. Enterprises suffer in sales and customer satisfaction if business critical applications fail to respond lightning quick. As enterprises are increasingly demanding better speed and efficiency from data centres; Flash cache technology will gain traction as it offers higher Input and Output (I/O) data rates than a conventional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Flash based solid state drives (SSDs) can also manage a considerable amount of workloads without increasing the cost of data centre operations.
Virtualization – To address the increasing performance demands. enterprises of all sizes will either transform their physical infrastructures to virtual hosts to optimize their workloads, or will move to a completely hosted virtual infrastructure in the coming years for scalability.
Mobile Applications for data centre management. Mobile applications like Op Manager from Manage Engine and Big Brother from Dell are improving work order communications and collaborations in a data centre. Such applications are relieving data centre managers from dashboard applications running on PCs, while also delivering system status and actionable information on a mobile device. Vendors in the coming years will increasingly focus on developing mobile applications for monitoring, management and automation of infrastructure hardware from a mobile.
Focus on converged infrastructure. In order to implement a more scalable, simplified and cost efficient IT infrastructure, enterprises in the coming years will increasingly focus on converging servers, data storage, networking equipment and software.
Data centre architectures are changing to meet the demands and complexities imposed by increasing business requirements like scalability, efficiency and security to stay competitive. Challenges including an abrupt growth in data have given rise to trends such as data centre consolidation and server virtualisation which in turn are reshaping the data centre designs.
Source: CXO Today
About The Author: Sanchit Vir Gogia is the Chief Analyst & CEO of Greyhound Research, an independent IT & Telecom Research & Advisory firm. He also serves as Founder & CEO of Greyhound Knowledge Group that operates under four brands – Greyhound Research, Greyhound Sculpt, Greyhound Technocrat and Greyhound Vivo. To read more about him, click here.