Server Blades Will Account For One in Four Servers Sold in Europe by 2009

Western Europe IDC: Western Europe server blade market is expected to reach 565,000 units by 2009, or one in every four servers sold in the region. In revenue terms server blades are forecast to account for $1.74 billion of vendor revenue in 2009, representing a CAGR of 40.4% through the forecast period.Despite a slow start to the market since the inception of this technology, 2004 represented the inflection point for server blade adoption. Today blades represent the hyper-growth segment of the server market and such performance in relation to other server categories is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. While today blades are still seen by many as little more than an alternative, if denser, form factor, the increased adoption of blades in the enterprise will help facilitate a fundamental shift in enterprise computing towards Dynamic IT concepts.This development is driven by a necessity to simplify IT infrastructure and the ability of companies to react faster to changing business environments and demands. In effect, developing blade-based datacenters or functions together with advances in virtualization and consolidation are a step towards the marriage of IT operations and business concepts. This is where the characteristics of blades will come to the fore as the enabler, where the speed of change is heavily dependent on vendors providing business process automation through their management applications in addition to the hardware. While to date the server blade has been seen squarely as an enterprise-class platform, looking forward, that a large portion of server blade revenue will be driven through SMB sales as vendors look to develop integrated solutions in a box that can be easily sold through a 2-tier channel. In terms of verticals, we are already seeing blades move from early adopter/visionary-type customers such as HPC and financial services and into areas such as manufacturing and retail. Although blades have obvious ROI and management efficiency benefits over other server solutions, there remain a number of inhibitors to blade technology adoption, including the provision of power to the rack and physical cooling of datacenters, which had not been built with such highly dense arrays of systems in mind. For vendors, solving the thermodynamics and cooling issue remains high on the agenda and the array of solutions is continually increasing.

Western Europe Server Blade Forecast, 2005–2009 Publ 20050614