Server market permanently under the Cloud says EMC boss

Stan Beer
Monday, 08 June 2009 14:39

Opinion and Analysis

"The reality is that the CIO today is very concerned about operational efficiency and effectiveness and is looking for ways to reduce costs. VMware has a very strong economic value proposition for a CIO and I think we're seeing fundamental changes in CIO thinking with regards to how build their environments for the future," he says.


"The overaching thing is that data centre of today is not going to be the data centre of the future."

So did Webster think that what's good for VMware, virtualisation and cloud computing is bad for the likes of Dell, IBM, Sun, HP and other server hardware makers?

"Yes I think what's going to happen is that the vision of cloud computing is one of flexibility, a dynamic environment which can be utilised as and when needed and the infrastructures that you're going to need for that type of environment are not the technologies that people have necessarily in their data centres today," Webster said.

Does that mean a permanent reduction in server hardware? Is this a trend?

"Data centres will shift from being compute farms to infrastructure where information can be stored, delivered, and switched very quickly," he said.

"I think that the CIO focus is on efficiency and cost and therefore the pressure on all parts of information technology infrastructure will remain. I believe that the economic environment has caused the CIOs to sweat their assets longer of which the server fleet is a key part.

"You combine that with technologies like VMware and you're starting to see change in the approach.

"When you get a shift in technologies, when you get a consolidation of the unified network fabric into the unified computing platform, you're going to get a change and therefore there is going to be some erosion of the existing server market."

Some erosion in the existing server market has equated to a 40% reduction in year on year sales for the first quarter of 2009. The second quarter results, when they come in, should reveal a lot about whether we have merely witnessed a downturn or a true paradigm shift.