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Embracing New Trends

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The infrastructure market is evolving rapidly and the prominent trends that will shape the infrastructure landscape are ‘as-a-service' offerings and enterprise services. Both the trends are increasingly becoming the norm for infrastructure services and the cloud infrastructure trend has been shaping up quite aggressively and some service providers have already embraced it while the clients have started to adopt it. The cloud is impacting the traditional server market and the way people and corporate store their data. Industry forecasts the cloud server sales will double in 2012, compared to 2010, and will double again by 2015. This huge increment is based upon the services offered to smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers, which are served on behalf of cloud servers or in simple words, the services that we use via these devices are hosted upon servers that are cloud ready.

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Northward Growth

According to IHS iSuppli research, cloud server sales will almost double in 2012 compared to 2010 and are on track to become the fastest-growing segment of servers by 2015 when units will again double to 1,774,000. "The cloud can be deployed infraas software, platform, or infrastructure to help keep information technology costs down," quotes Peter Lin, senior analyst. "Benefits are many, including higher utilization of server devices, low capital expenditure for clients, high scalability, and access to the service across multiple devices."

Overall, the 5-year compound annual growth rate for cloud servers is destined to become 5 times greater than the server market as a whole, more than 30% compared to 6%. And while total shipments of cloud servers were just 5% of the total server market in 2010, it will grow to more than 15% by 2015.

With clear visibility to cloud infrastructure, technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are using their own cloud offerings to sell hardware, content, and other cloud services which are fueling the growth of the cloud infrastructure market.

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Cloud-enabled Servers

Cloud has given birth to a new breed of infrastructure market, which is gaining edge and industry predicts this new breed of cloud-enable infrastructure will takeover the traditional market. These new set of data centers would transform the current era of data centers and cloud storage that would define and era of dramatic simplification for data centers. No longer shall we need specialized hardware, dedicated data center consultants and program the device.

One such breed of servers is Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), a cloud approach to traditional networking in which control is decoupled from hardware and given to a software application, which means the entire data center configuration is managed through software unlike the traditional data centers where the infrastructure is typically defined and thus managed by combination of hardware and other devices.

Bypassing infrastructure rigidity, the cloud enable infrastructure overlooks traditional constraints to change the way data centers have been perceived yet. Market seems to be highly excited as major giants such as VMware, IBM, Dell, and HP has already forayed into the business.

Today, industry is fighting with a huge mismatch between data centers and emerging technologies, cloud-enabled data centers extend the value of the ongoing IT investment by intelligent resource allocations, maximizing all existing physical infrastructure capacity.

Cloud Computing-A Promise to Infrastructure Services

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The growth of the cloud computing is driving infrastructure market forward. Organizations have now passed the first stage and are implementing cloud architectures for their enterprise and as a result, the traditional role of the IT infrastructure is changing.

In the year 2012, the impact of the shift to cloud computing will become apparent. One of the first obvious effects will be the cloud-driven transformation of whole industries. Cloud application platform/PaaS wars will intensify.

The cloud is no longer a competitive advantage, but has become an operational necessity for infra structure services. Results from a recent KPMG survey show that 81% of businesses are either planning their initial cloud computing forays, or are in early or advanced stages of experimentation or have full implementations.

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As cloud emerges as a new storage market, competition is increasing with leading infrastructure vendors. Although the external private cloud infrastructure market is still in its nascent stage, both small and large enterprises are utilizing it heavily and are the primary consumers of cloud infrastructure.

Recent IDC cloud research shows that worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $21.5 bn in 2010 and will reach $72.9 bn in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6%. This rapid growth rate will fuel the growth of servers and other storage offerings based on the cloud model.

On the question of changing role of infrastructure services, Raman Sapra, executive director, strategy and M&A, applications & BPO, Dell Services asserts how cloud will play a game changer role together with enterprise mobility and analytics. "With the rise of cloud, infrastructure management services portfolio is bound to get a complete makeover. Emphasis will lie more onto using cloud infrastructure to overhaul the scope and economics of traditional infrastructure services," says Sapra.

An open technology and business environment, enabled by cloud computing and new infrastructure models, is creating a radically new approach to the present infrastructure services. Most of the global infrastructure service providers have a strong vision and strategy for cloud based services for future offerings.

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