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.