* Gartner’s Jeffrey Hewitt gives his take on servers, Linux
At the recent Gartner PlanetStorage conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., principal analyst Jeffrey Hewitt made several interesting points about Linux and servers.
Among them:
* The average price of a single server has dropped more than $18,000 since 1996, from $25,000 to just over $7,000 last year.
* Server growth is going to be constrained to the single digits. There are some areas such as virtualization where double-digit growth will take place.
* Among the drivers in the server market is economic growth; healthy economies demand server technologies. The growth of the Internet, cell phones, PDAs and smart phones has also driven server growth, as servers are needed to support the back-end infrastructure for these technologies.
* Linux installations are expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 11.7% from 2005 to 2010. The open-source operating system is moving from file and print services and Web infrastructure to line-of-business applications such as databases. Of the approximately 120 attendees in Hewitt’s session, 24% used Linux for Web services, 20% used it for infrastructure and edge-of-network applications and 19% used it primarily for databases.
* Of the systems vendors shipping Linux distributions, HP is the leader with 24% of the shipments, followed by Dell with 20% and IBM with 19%. IBM leads in Linux revenue primarily because many of its mainframes ship with Linux.
* In blade servers, according to Gartner, IBM takes the lead with 40% of the market, followed by HP with 36% and Sun with 6%. Dell trails at 4%.
* The primary driver for blade servers is the expected reduction in management costs associated with blades’ greater efficiency and the ability to install more servers in a smaller space.
* Blade servers are expected to exceed 2.5 million units and $8 billion in revenue by 2010.
