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The server industry is under an increased scrutiny this year, with some vendors set to back away due to controversial perceptions of a shrinking market, despite shipments having risen throughout 2014, reports JJ WORRALL

Server industry^ critical juncture

IN 2014 WORLDWIDE server shipments rose by 2.2%, a modest but noticeable rise it came off the back of a particularly strong fourth quarter and a stellar year for market leader HP and its rivals. Asked what the key factor may have been to see this bump in interest, Stephen Kelly, systems group manager for IBM Ireland focused on both resilience and performance" as being critical in influencing enterprise spend.

"Resilience is a key factor and this is because of consumer perspectives and demands. Consumers today expect brands to perform in a world that is now 24/7, 365 days per year, available online and always on. Not being available to consumers all the time, can lead to brand damage and reputation damage, said Kelly.

This, he added, has become inescapable due to social media platforms where consumers can communicate about your brand anytime, day or night across the world. As a result, the IBM man said, performance must become a key factor as "you need to manage your business delivery to meet your consumer demands.

The IBM man said that Businesses therefore need to be able to access data in real time and to analyse that data and react to meet their consumers. They also need to share that information with their business to support the demands for their products and services. If servers cannot perform to meet resilience and performance at these new levels of demand then your servers are creating issues across all levels of your business."

Support services For Martin Sinnott, converged infrastructure manager at Dell, support services have been a key factor in server investment of late, noting that his company has "put much investment in to ensure the correct level of proactive support is available on all the server range to ensure uptime and service availability.

The second key factor in making a decision surrounding server investment for Sinnott is management tools to ensure that a company's IT administrators "have full access to the data and solutions on offer, while also coming with the added bonus of alert systems built into the server as standard both from onsite and also mobile enabled.

David Kinsella, chief technology officer with Datapac, said that for his

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money, choosing a server actually "comes down to five key requirements". Top of the list, he said, will always be the computer requirements or needs of the applications; for example how much CPU, RAM, network and disk space are required for your business?"

Next up, he said that thought has to be given to the electrical power and cooling needs of the server. Exact figures need to be calculated, he added, with this being dependent on "the model and the number and types of components such as CPU. RAM and disk".

Deployment scale and density are a big factor too, he continued, making up his third key requirement. Kinsella said that with regards to this point, Taking a complete design into account, including available space, decisions are made regarding the number of servers to deploy and in what configuration to deploy.

Some use cases suit multiple small servers, while others may require a small number of larger servers. Future expansion requirements also need to be considered; if you need more CPU or RAM, do you deploy a new server or upgrade the existing servers? Management tools also play a role, asked the Datapac CTO.

His next key requirement was focused around management tools, noting that IT administration departments working to the demands made upon businesses these days "cannot be physically on-site all the time and trips to the communications room tend to be on a rack and stack' basis. Solid centralised management tools that allow for monitoring, operating system (OS) deployments, patching and remote access are critical in the ever-changing IT world, he said.

The final note for potential buyers, he said, is to look to the future of the investment and consider total cost of ownership (TCO). The expected lifespan of a server is generally between three and five years. cautioned Kinsella. Taking into account maintenance, support and running costs, the overall TCO of a server is a key decision-making tool when it comes down to choice.

Market leaders Examining the marketplace as a whole, Kinsella said it has historically been dominated by three core heavyweights in HP, IBM and Dell. We havent seen any notable new entrants, possibly because the worldwide physical server market is in decline, he said.

The main reason for this, he said, is unsurprisingly server virtualisation, which has proven to be been quite successful for a growing number of organisations. Server virtualisation allows more virtual servers to be produced from a single physical server. Many businesses find it to be a more efficient and effective option. Many organisations however still have servers located onpremise

as this is the best fit for their needs. A good provider can advise businesses on what server will best suit their needs, he added.

As for where exactly server spend is heading of late, Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner - responsible for the 2014 server market sales figures mentioned above - said in March that on a worldwide basis, hyperscale data centre deployments, as well as service provider installations, drove the x86-based server market upward," during 2014.

Sales figures from the report noted that in the final quarter of last year HP extended its revenue share lead in with the EMEA

Businesses need to be able to access data in real time and to analyse that data and react to meet their consumers. They also need to share that information with their business to support the demands for their products and services. If servers cannot perform to meet resilience and performance at these new levels of demand then your servers are creating issues across all levels of your business, Stephen Kelly, IBM

region with an impressive 10% growth though this period conversely saw a 1.5% decline in server shipments. Dell held the second spot in EMEA as IBM's divestment of x86 servers to Lenovo reduced IBM's position to third, added the report.

Overall, Hewitt said, Enterprises had less unit growth impact because of the ongoing presence of physical server consolidation through x86-server virtualisation. This overall market growth developed despite declines in both mainframe and Unix platforms."

Lenovo's place in the industry looks set to change in the near future though with vice president of

Lenovo APAC enterprise business group, Kong Meng Koh, announcing in May 2015 that the company plans to take the number one global position in the server market over the next five years.

We see, unlike many vendors out there, the server market has been a growth industry, he said at the time. There is a wave of [internet of things] loT and cloud, and we will hit an accelerated adoption curve in those devices, and we think it will generate environments for servers and storage on the backend. We want to position ourselves for that growth when it happens."

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mJ Faster speeds

One additional name in the market is that of Fujitsu and Paul Frost, channel manager with Fujtisu Ireland said that the companys RX300s have been the mainstay of its server base in Ireland for a number of years due to its ability to be scaled to particular customer requirements. However he said that with regards to his company the newer RX2540M1 has now superseded it. Frost said the RX2540M1, is a modular rack mounted 2U server "for both the standalone multi-function small business to the database, high virtualisation datacentre environments.

Over at IBM meanwhile, Kelly said its VersaStack solution is gaining a lot of traction" among Irish clients. It offers, he said, the opportunity to deploy a scalable solution that gives you an agility that means you can attach any of over 300 different storage arrays." Referring back to fA Gartners recent findings on the servers marketplace he noted that according to the research giants, by the end of this year, 35% of total server shipped value will be as integrated solutions, demonstrates the market is moving in this direction.

He noted too that figures from online technology community Wikibon claim that by 2017, nearly two thirds of all enterprise application infrastructures will be packaged in the form of a converged solution."

Modern workloads Dells Sinnott said that a "wave of new, modern workloads has been forcing companies to find a bridge between current infrastructure and future investment. Like Frost and Kelly, focusing on his own companys offerings, he said, By converging hardware, management and workloads, the Dell PowerEdge FX server solution allows customers to precisely tailor, quickly deploy and easily manage a diverse set of applications using a common set of modular IT building blocks.

A key factor in making a decision surrounding server investment is management tools to ensure that IT administrators have full access to the data and solutions on offer, while also coming with the added bonus of alert systems built into the server as standard both from onsite and also mobile enabled, Martin Sinnott, Dell

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Sinnott added that as well as its FX range of servers, the Irish market has been attracted to the VRTX solution which integrates Dells modular servers "into a format that can be placed into any business or office and serve as a full data centre in a box with up to 24 shared hard drive and fully integrated switching fabric.

Kinsella meanwhile said that Irish businesses are "still heavily invested in the HP ProLiant ranges." Though he noted that more recent Gen9 models provide faster speeds with the same footprint and better integration for management tools. HP's central management system OneView, he continued, is becoming increasingly

popular among Irish businesses as it allows administrators more central control over the ever growing number of systems that organisations are deploying.

Future Looking ahead to where clients may push their spend over the coming 18 months, Sinnott felt that with the emergence of software defined enterprise (SDE), the server has moved back into the main part of the data centre again. Expanding on his point, he continued, The web-scale technology which has been used by all the major IT providers is now becoming available to the mainstream IT industry, this means the server or a group of servers can now act as the full datacentre thus replacing the need for traditional server area network (SAN) based architecture.

Datapac's Kinsella commented that, as computer demand increases, Irish business are looking for options that can hit that

well-worn target of fitting 'more into less. Servers offering consolidated approaches are being looked at more seriously, he said, adding that in the past blade servers and virtualisation filled this void. However, he added, the requirements for virtual desktops will continue to push a number of systems to the fore which can provide a smaller denser footprint and lower energy costs.

For IBM Irelands Kelly the focus of the future for the servers industry is intertwined with open source cloud computing platform OpenStack and the application portabilityfocused

container technology, Docker, which of course is also open source.

Taking a complete design into account including space, decisions are made regarding the number of servers to deploy and in what configuration. Some use cases suit multiple small servers, while others may require a small number of larger servers. Future expansion requirements also need to be considered; if you need more CPU or RAM, do you deploy a new server or upgrade the existing servers? David Kinsella, Datapac

OpenStack OpenStack is a key determinant in server space," Kelly said. The OpenStack cloud operating system can control large groups of servers, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre and it is designed for scalability, so businesses can easily add new computer and storage resources to grow their cloud computing solution over time. OpenStack is designed to be massively

horizontally scalable, which allows all services to be distributed widely.

As a result, Kelly continued, a storage-focused OpenStack design architecture server hardware selection allows businesses are able to focus on a scale up versus scale out solution. As for Docker, Kelly was keen to talk about what it offers in terms of providing a way to package an application in a virtual container so that it can be run across different distributions.

Docker helps system administrators deploy and run any app on any infrastructure, quickly and reliably, he said. It enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result IT administrators can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data centre and any cloud without the 'well it runs on this machine' finger pointing approach.

The RX300 has been the mainstay of the Fujitsu server base in Ireland for a number of years, but is now superseded by modular systems for both multi-function in small business, databases and high virtualisation datacentre environments, Paul Frost, Fujitsu

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