Server & Workstations: The Year That Was

India pulls another growth

year for the x86 and the UNIX space.

The star verticals BFSI, Telcom and Manufacturing drove the market.

AMD's escalating clout in the

server space became evident over the year. According to the estimates in the

first quadrant of 2006 provided by Mercury Research, worldwide processor market

share of AMD's x86 server market grew to 22.1% in Q1

'06 up from 16.4% in Q4 '05, a 35% increase. AMD has identified

India as an important market and designated it as a high growth region. 

Server

prices hit all time low over the year with all vendors offering entry

level servers based on the x86 architecture (32-bit) for the price of a PC. In

fact, in this segment of the market, the distinction between a professional PC

and a server is blurring.

The UNIX side, a turf dominated

by Sun, saw some changes. IBM, attacked the UNIX space with aggression and in

the bargain, the UNIX server market over the year became

a three horse race with Sun, IBM and HP battling it out.

Another major trend over the

year was the escalation of blade servers

that became part of the mainstream computing

environment. The rapid adoption of blades is clearly changing the

personality of servers. Typical candidates for blades are enterprises, which

already have more tower servers and when those enterprise expanded, they went in

for blades.

CIOs looking at maximizing their IT

spend, looked at server consolidation and

virtualization very seriously. The need to optimize the usage of IT

resources within the enterprise prompted large enterprises to consider server

and application consolidation solutions.