Proprietary servers keep losing ground

When B.F. Goodrich spun off its performance-materials division in February 2001, it created a $1 billion specialty chemical company that found itself supporting multiple server platforms better-suited for a $5 billion corporation. First on the new company's to-do list was to revamp its server hardware.

The spinoff discovered that multiple proprietary systems from companies such as Compaq and Sun were draining support and maintenance resources.

"We didn't have a staff that could support so many platforms," says Todd Nelson, vice president of global IT at Goodrich spinoff Noveon in Cleveland. "So we did an infrastructure road map last year to figure out where do we want to be and how are we going to get there. We created a road map of standardization, server consolidation and bringing [database] servers under control."

That meant scrapping the proprietary RISC-based servers and moving onto Intel-based servers from Dell.

Analysts expect more businesses to make similar shifts as the performance of x86-based servers, which run on industry-standard chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), improves. This can offer stepped-up processing power and scalability at prices below RISC-based boxes.

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Today, more than 90% of servers that cost $25,000 or less are based on Intel chips, and analysts expect Intel also to become more widely used in midrange servers. Giga Information Group predicts that within five years, Intel-based platforms running Linux and Microsoft operating systems will "take at least half of the market share currently owned by RISC/Unix."

A number of factors are helping push the trend, not the least of which is the tough economy that is forcing companies to look for ways to save money while maintaining performance. Intel is feeding into that desire by investing heavily in its chips, and earlier this summer rolled out new and improved Xeon MP and Itanium 2 processors.

In addition, operating systems from Linux and Microsoft, which run on x86, continue to mature and virtualization software for Intel-based machines from companies such as VMware increases the flexibility of Intel-based boxes.

Further, a wider array of applications that are available for x86 vs. proprietary systems, and the fact that competition is pushing prices of x86 servers down and their performance and scalability up makes them an increasingly viable option.

"If Intel-based systems continue to improve as rapidly as we expect, then by 2005 the only niche left for the RISC-based systems where they will enjoy a performance advantage is the extreme high-performance fringe - a market for at most several thousand systems a year," analysts at Giga wrote in a report last year in which they predicted a move toward Intel-based boxes.

Market share shifting

Server shipments reflect the expected shift, with Unix/RISC-based server shipments dropping as the number of Intel-based boxes sold rises. According to IDC, spending on x86 servers represented 37% of the market in 2001, but accounted for 44% of spending in the first quarter of this year. About half of all money spent on servers in 2001 went for RISC-based boxes, which accounted for just 43% of spending in the first quarter of 2003.