Serving Good Times

As we took an audit of the Indian server market for fiscal

2004-05, the results brought to fore the buoyancy the server market demonstrated

over the year with the x86 server market growing by 29% in unit terms. During

the same period, the UNIX servers also grew at a healthy rate with BFSI,

Telecom, and Energy verticals driving the market. Right now, the x86 accounts

for 50% of the total server market. A major trend in the server space relates to

the emergence of the dual core processors and the evolution of the x86 64-bit

platform. Most of the vendors aver that by 2007, x86 32 bit systems would be

almost phased out. As we trace the evolution of the 64-bit architecture, AMD

should be credited with pioneering the dual core processors in the x86 space

with backward compatibility. This development kick started the market movement

towards x86 64-bit from the 32-bit platform.

Intel brought in Itanium 2, 64-bit, but the drawback was that

Itanium is a pure 64-bit platform. During the last year, Intel announced the EMT

64T extensions to its Xeon processors that enabled users to run both 32 bit and

64 bit applications. Quips Alok Ohrie, vice president-systems and technology

group, IBM India; "This was a good move because the customers were

forthcoming in adopting this platform since the investment would remain

protected. Moreover, the advance hardware features that came with the new

systems designed for these new processors resulted in much better performance

over the 32-bit processors based systems of previous generation. Even for the

same set of 32-bit application and 32-bit Operating System, the performance on

new systems was at least 20% better."

The 64-bit x86 Migration



As applications become more mission critical, more enterprises will adopt

the 64-bit platform due to more reliability and stability it brings to the

table. Says Ohrie, "Over the past one year, the adoption has reached the

levels in excess of 95% for the two-way x86 servers." The move from 32-bit

to 64-bit computing offers a dramatic improvement in performance and

reliability, enabling people to use computing resources in exciting new ways.

Reflecting on this, KP Unnikrishnan, marketing director, Sun Microsystems India

says, "The value of a processor with a wider data path (8, 16, 32, 64 bits)

is that it increases the amount of data that can be handled and processed inside

the CPU during a single cycle. Only now (in x86 market) are we beginning to see

software that takes advantage of 64-bit computing. Going forward, the 64-bit

CPUs will be ubiquitous enough that a game developer, application author, or OS

manufacturer will design a product that does not just use a 64-bit system for

enhancements, but utilizes its capabilities as a fundamental part of the end

product."

Server Market Dynamics Over the last two quarters, the server market has seen growth in primarily three areas:  Blade Servers This is the fastest growing segment in the server space. Many organizations are greatly appreciating its benefits, leading to growing adoption rate for blades in the market space. Unix Business The UNIX market continues to be a favorite with companies wishing to run mission critical and core applications. The key investments are seen in the Telecom and BFS space. It is RISC computing that is ruling in this space. Volume Business With all vendors coming in with offerings of less than Rs 50,000, this market is posed for explosive growth. The SMB customers are the prime targets for most server vendors in this space. The market is fast penetrating into Class B towns now.

Clearly, 64-bit is the in thing in the server space. As

enterprises scale up their servers with application scenarios calling for more

processing power, the shift to 64-bit is inevitable. The market response vendors

are getting for the 64-bit CPUs in recent times is very encouraging. For

instance, Sun Microsystems over the last fiscal has grown and consolidated its

position in the x86 64-bit market. This has been achieved primarily as a result

of Sun's focus and thrust on its line of Opteron based servers. As 64-bit

computing makes its presence felt in the x86 server space, customers of one-way

and entry-level two-way servers are graduating to high-end two-way. For Sun,

since the month of February, two million downloads of Solaris 10 has happened,

more than 70% of which were on the x86 64-bit.

The Affordability Factor



Notwithstanding the technology migrations, the key for success of any

technology lies in users adopting it. Given that, affordability plays a key role

when one takes an enterprise view. It is a well-known fact that CIOs today look

at various cost optimization measures. Says Ohrie: "The affordability

factor plays a key role in the server market today. And it has gained greater

significance over the years, especially with the SMB players who are making

large IT investments. Today, IBM offers servers for Rs 48,000. That makes it

affordable for a very small business."

Vendors are also adopting open standards that are taking

affordability to new levels. According to industry experts, affordability is not

about reducing costs by increasing volumes, it is also about using industry

standard technology combined with best of design skills to reduce the overall

cost of ownership. Quips Ohrie, "The best example of affordability is the

blade center servers. It uses the same Intel processor like most of our

competition. It uses the same chipset, power supplies, switches, and hard drives

that industry standard servers use. But it reduces your cost of hardware

ownership by 54%, space by 90% and overall cost of ownership, over a period of

time, by a staggering 70%, that comes out of power savings and maintenance

costs."

In the affordability paradigm, blades are ushering in a whole

new dimension to TCO and RoI. For instance, a blade puts in 28 processors into a

7U chasis that incorporates much more than a normal chasis. The chasis holds the

power supply for all the 28 servers, it integrates the switches, cooling fans,

USB ports, PCI slots across these servers and reduces the server to bare bone

essentials--like processor, chipset, hard disks. Thus, customers save on

unwarranted power supplies, cooling facilities, which would have to be purchased

separately when one buys stand-alone servers. The technology is so attractive

that customers incur a straight advantage in price even when they consider

buying a blade server instead of five stand-alone servers.

Affordability has various dimensions and industry experts

believe that the key to success in the server market lies in understanding user

demands and providing technologies that are affordable, when they require it.

One has to see examples of various seasonal demand patterns of computing

resources: Companies whose requirements peak in patches--only during specific

periods. During Wimbledon, the hits on the site peaks to four million per day,

while normally it is not more than a few hundred. A company's HR department

needs peak power last three days in a month due to payroll work and the capacity

remains unutilized during normal times. These are cases where capacity

utilization on demand offering proves an economically viable solution for

customers. Customers can build spare processors within their servers and pay for

using them only when it is required.

Sun Microsystems recently announced a new family of

enterprise-class x86 64-bit multi-core servers, which are powered standards by

AMD Opteron processors. The servers are claimed to have the highest-performance

x64 processors on the market, and running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The

new industry-standard servers consume about one-third the power, are

one-and-a-half times the performance, and cost half as much as comparably

configured four-way servers from other vendors.

Says Unnikrishnan, "The new industry-standard x64

multi-core available server family begins with the Sun Fire X2100, the lowest

cost single-socket x64 rack-mount server, starting at Rs 43,975 and includes the

two-socket, 4-way Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers. Future servers in

this same family are being designed to accommodate up to eight multi-core

processors to achieve 16-way mid-range system performance levels, offering

customers the ability to standardize x64 servers across their entire IT

infrastructure."

Consolidation is the Key



Riding closely with the affordability factor is the concept that is gaining

strength by the day--server consolidation. The need to optimize usage of IT

resources within the enterprise is prompting large enterprises to consider

server and application consolidation solutions. Several large IT spenders in the

country, primarily banks, telcos and manufacturing organizations are moving up

the IT maturity curve very rapidly from the perspective of both IT

infrastructure deployment as well as the provisioning of value added services.

Quips Unnikrishnan: "With networks increasing in complexity, managing the

pace of growth and the spiraling costs is becoming a major pre-occupation for

most CIOs.

Further, added pressure on the incumbents to deliver better

returns on investments made is prompting a shift to a consolidated server and

application environment. This trend will definitely continue over this year,

with other segments also voicing similar needs."

Yet another area where the effect of consolidation will be

felt more is on the data centers. The data centers in India, over the last few

years, have installed multiple servers and storage devices. Says Ohrie,

"Data is sitting in these servers, without being leveraged and most of

capacity of these servers are under utilized. When you implement virtualization

you do it in two ways. One, you put a software layer over the existing hardware

infrastructure and integrate it in a manner that it allows you to leverage

pending capacity lying in various parts of your infrastructure into areas where

it is critically required--thus bringing in huge savings to building additional

hardware capacity and real estate".

As we look at the current server dynamics, all vendors are

going out with the latest technologies, and in the ongoing year the SMBs are

touted as one hot area that will aggressively go for x86 offerings with the

escalation of the affordability factor. Meanwhile, large enterprises will

embrace a combination of latest server technologies and usher in more

reliability for their mission critical applications. In all, in the past two

quarters, all vendors have demonstrated good traction for their offerings and

are indeed bullish about the road ahead.

Shrikanth G

in Chennai