Virtualisation surge stems server shipments

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 March 2007 02:55

Business IT - Technology

Rapid takeup of virtualisation technology has led IDC to trim its prediction of the number of servers that will be sold in coming years.

The analyst firm says the trend - along with a complementary shift to multi-core CPUs - will slash 4.5 million units from the server market over the period 2006-10.

"Each of these technologies is impactful to the market in their own right. However, the use of multi-core technology in conjunction with server virtualization tools has a compounding impact on server configurations, and accelerates the ability of IT organizations to exploit the benefits of multi-core technology," said Michelle Bailey, research vice president for IDC's Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends.

In other words, multi-core CPUs allow manufacturers to deliver more power in one box, while virtualisation allows buyers to exploit a bigger proportion of that power.

"Unlike other previous multicore introductions that took time to become mainstream as customers changed their application code, virtualization allows customers to fully exploit the improvements in x86 processors immediately, accelerating business benefits and thereby increasing adoption rates," Bailey added.

The trend will reduce sales by an average of just under $US500 million per year, and instead of x86-based shipments increasing by 61 percent to 2010, IDC now predicts 39 percent growth. The reduction in unit volume will be partially offset by the need for more memory, discs and I/O channels to handle the increased CPU utilisation provided by virtualisation.

IDC predicts that over 14 percent of the servers shipped in 2010 - 1.7 million units - will be used for virtualisation and will be deployed as 7.9 million virtual servers.

VMware is the market leader in x86 server virtualisation, and the open-source Xen is built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and some other Linux distributions. Microsoft's current offering, Virtual Server, uses a different type of technology and runs multiple OSes under a host copy of Windows Server. To compete with VMware and Xen, the company is expected to introduce a hypervisor (code-named Viridian) after the next major version of Windows Server.