With lower costs, quicker availability and a strong roadmap, x86-based servers are outpacing machines based on other architectures in the high-end server market.
By Pupul Dutta
As more and more companies in India mature in their usage of technology, the demand for high-end servers is growing at a fast clip. Also, enterprises are gradually shifting toward the usage of real-time based data transmission, which further accelerates the demand for high-end servers. Industry verticals like manufacturing, BFSI, IT/ITeS and the government sector are also believed to be fueling growth in this segment.
The market composition, however, is seeing interesting trends wherein the dominance of RISC/ Itanium systems is being threatened by the performance and popularity of x86-based machines. Though vendors differ in their opinion about the popularity of x86 servers, but market reports suggest that x86 sales are zooming up as compared to their counterparts on other processor platforms.
According to Marshal Amaldas, Manager, Server and Storage Research, IDC India, x86 servers constitute a vast majority of all the servers shipped today. “The prime reason for such popularity is the fact that x86 servers are cost-efficient. Also, maintenance and upgrade is easy and affordable/cheap, and the manufacturing cycle is lower, making it easily available for an urgent demand as compared to other servers. Lastly, the convenience to scale up the infrastructure easily is another reason driving its growth.” he says.
Trends in high-end servers
Traditionally, most enterprises have used high-end servers for needs varying from hosting their websites to running business applications. Of late, however, there is a propensity for organizations (particularly large enterprises) to invest in high-performance servers to support use cases such as real-time analytics, where techniques such as in-memory processing are being used to minimize the lag between data and compute.
The notion of culling intelligence from unstructured and semi-structured data (big data) has also made businesses more thirsty for compute power.
“A lot of technology innovation in the recent years in both servers and storage has been toward maximizing the use of hardware resources and optimizing PUE (power usage effectiveness) of the data center. Technologies such as server virtualization, thin provisioning, MAID (massive array of idle disks), data compression/de-duplication, storage tiering, intelligent load balancing and density optimized servers are emerging in the market,” says Amaldas.
Another noticeable trend in high-end servers is the fabric, which is the conglomeration of IP, which is a very high router-cum-switch that forms the core of any high-end server. “The trend that we see currently is to have a central fabric within the server where the bandwidth can be increased as you increase the number of CPUs or I/Os. As opposed to the high-end servers which were attached to the back tray which had a fixed bandwidth, today you can add additional bandwidth just by adding a fabric in the center of the CPU. That is one of the major trends that is emerging,” says Santanu Ghose, Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India.
Adoption of multiple hypervisors in organizations is another key emerging trend in the high-end server market. “Hypervisor allows multiple operating systems for a single hardware system, thus helping companies to adopt virtualization technology according to the applications they want to run and the in-house skills they already possess,” says Rekuram Vardharaj, Marketing Director – Enterprise Solutions and Growth Markets, Dell India.
According to IDC, the total size of the Indian server market for 2011 was $671 million, of which approximately three-fourth contribution was from volume servers (entry level), one-tenth from high-end servers and the remaining from mid-range server sales.
Trends in mid-range servers
The mid-range market is driven by blade servers, as they help to drive down power and cooling cost. “Blade servers are increasingly in demand given their ability to carry the load of high-end servers,” says Ghose of HP.
Basically, x86 architecture is a sweet spot for mid-range servers. Due to the simple architecture of x86, customers are moving from SPARC or Itanium-based systems to the x86 architecture systems. This reduces their TCO (total cost of ownership) for deployment, application development and management. “One of the key trends in this space is improving efficiency to improve the system usage. Converged infrastructure and virtualization are keys to efficient IT operations. With trends like big data, social media and BYOD, customers are demanding more from their IT operations, which is driving IT to get simpler architecture that can be managed efficiently,” says Vardharaj.
Despite all the capabilities, there have been reports that the mid-range server market has been steadily declining. Vardharaj seconds the view, saying, “Yes, mid-range servers have seen a slight decline owing largely to poor macro-economic conditions coupled with a number of technology transitions.”
But overall, companies that do not have the budgets for high-end servers and yet want enterprise-class machines for key business apps will continue to go for mid-range servers.
How IT decision makers choose
For companies making a technology decision a lot of things are taken into consideration. So, for electrical goods major Havells, scalability, power efficiency and redundancy were prime requirements when it wanted to install servers in its office.
“We are using Wintel and Unix (RISC) servers. One of the prime reasons for this choice was that wherever application permits were required, UNIX was chosen due to virus-free capability, stability, scalability, performance and its robust nature,” says Vivek Khanna, Vice President – IT, Havells India Ltd.
McDonald’s, the global fast-food chain, uses Intel Xeon-based servers from IBM and Dell. “The major underlying factor that influences our decision is the fulfillment of technical specifications. The technical specifications are arrived at on the basis of the server-sizing recommendations provided by our service providers for various software applications. Some of the major factors influencing our server choices include performance, support, delivery time and price, besides the technical specifications,” explains Amit Jatia, Vice Chairman, Hardcastle Restaurants Pvt. Ltd., which operates and manages
McDonald’s restaurants in the West and South regions of India.
Talking about the challenges that the vendors are expected to face in the future, Jatia says, “ In the next few years, the requirement will be primarily based on service. Currently, customers face issues regarding service where it becomes difficult to assign a single responsibility as there are multiple vendors for a single set-up.”
The importance of cost-efficiency
Depending on the type and amount of workload they have, organizations opt for different types of servers. “For routine work, they (companies) are looking for servers that will provide performance at an attractive price. Such organizations can do well with x86 systems. Then there’s another area of the market where companies are clearly looking for a competitive edge. They have unique requirements and are willing to spend a little bit more to get well-integrated software, servers, and storage,” says Vardharaj.
Khanna of Havells, mentions “Nowadays, businesses demand stability, investment protection and, most importantly, performance; accordingly, technical decisions have to be taken,” he says.
McDonald’s, on the other hand, prefers quality over anything else. “Considering the server is the central point for all IT needs, the technical specifications are not compromised upon. It is only after the technical specifications and sizing requirements are fulfilled, that the cost factor comes into play while deciding on which server to go for,” explains Jatia.
The way forward
According to industry watchers, x86 will witness continued improvement in terms of both price and raw performance. At the same time, as the cost of computing continues to come down, it is expected that many more computing problems are going to crop up. Solving these problems will be the future role of high-end enterprise servers.
Moving forward, convergence is expected to be the key to reduce costs further. On the UNIX side, the market revenue declined at the rate of 8% from the year 2000 to 2010, according to industry reports. And just as UNIX hasn’t replaced mainframes—as it was once expected to—so it is with Linux and Windows. All server platforms continue to co-exist, though with different degrees of success in the market.
