Stan Beer
Monday, 08 June 2009 15:39
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The global server market suffered a devastating decline in the first
quarter and what has been tagged as the worst slump in history may be
due to a shift toward virtualisation and cloud computing rather just
than the economic downturn, according to an EMC senior executive.
In recent days, reports have been pouring in from
markets all over the world detailing massive year on year first quarter
declines in server unit shipments in the order of 40%. In a massively
exapnded IT&T market space, five years of hard won growth has been
erased and server sales are back to where they were back in 2004.
While it is tempting to simply shrug off the server slump as merely an
effect of the recent global financial crisis and say "things are bad
all over", the server market has been harder hit than most sectors
leading some analysts to ask why.
Questions have been raised as to whether there are other factors at
play. After all, the past two years have witnessed a concerted push
toward server consolidation from a number of differing sources, each
with their own agenda.
Green IT advocates are pushing the power saving line, virtualisation
vendors are pushing the server under-utilisation line, a multitude of
vendors are pushing the cloud computing line in an effort to shift
users off internal hardware infrastructure and IT shops are looking to
cut hardware costs by getting their computing resources to do more.
"The challenge that many CIOs and IT organisations are facing is one of
increasing costs to run their IT infrastructures and what this is
leading to is a lot of reviewing and planning on thinking about how the
data centre can be architected and operated differently moving
forward," David Webster, managing director of EMC Australian and New
Zealand told iTWire.
When asked whether that meant the enterprise server market is destined
to continue its slippery downward slide Webster was coy, trying to tie
the fate of desktops and servers together as equal victims of recent
economic hard times.
"I think the reality is that in the challenging economic environment,
assets such as servers and desktop computers are having their lives
extended," he said.
"The refresh of those technology platforms is not occurring as quickly today as probably what it occurred 12 or 18 months ago.
"Also what is happening is that VMware around virtualisation is allowing the more efficient use of platforms."
So does that mean the use of virtualisation, of which VMware is
currently the dominant market player, has negatively impacted the
server hardware space?
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