The server market in the country has been growing at a healthy rate for the last one year, and, according to analysts, this growth will continue in the next year as well. According to IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker 2Q 2007 released last month, the India server market grew by 30 percent year-on-year to touch $169 million. This was the second consecutive quarter when unit shipments grew by approximately 12 percent over the previous quarter.

As per industry insiders, there are two significant trends in the enterprise server space that have contributed to server growth: server virtualization and consolidation.

Virtual world
The business drivers for virtualization include server consolidation, improvement of utilization rates, reduction of data center complexity, reduction in operating costs and high availability of mission-critical
applications.

“This consolidation and virtualization will be seen more on the medium and high-end servers,” says Arnab Roy, general manager, marketing, Sun Microsystems.

According to VMware, virtualization will allow users to get much more value out of their physical computing resources. Consolidating x86 servers could drive utilization rates from the usual 5-15 percent to 70-80 percent.

“Virtualization takes advantage of the significant oversupply of hardware that is sitting idle (and consuming budget). Consolidation also has a trickle-down effect on other hardware and operational cost savings. Cost savings from virtualization can be significant—thousands of dollars per server virtualized per year,” says Raghu Raghuram, vice president, product and solutions marketing, VMware.

The multi-core effect
Industry insiders opine that multi-core processors will have a huge impact on IT deployments in the future. The reasons for this include significant performance improvement compared to previous generation processors. This, in effect, would provide a platform for driving consolidation and server virtualization.

In addition, there would be a superior performance per watt that translates into lower energy consumption. “Also, most of the software vendors are licensing their software based on a per socket basis (irrespective of the number of cores) which brings down cost. This factor will increase IT efficiency, reduce TCO and support growth of the IT infrastructure,” says R Ravichandran, director, sales, Intel South Asia.

Vendors like Intel and AMD have released quad-core processors specifically designed for multi-processor servers running applications requiring uncompromised performance, reliability and scalability. Such applications are typically run in virtualized environments for server consolidation and database uses, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence.

According to Vamsi Krishna, senior manager, technical, AMD India, there will be a roadblock for vendors treading the multi-core path in the years to come. As per industry experts, multi-core designers will be faced with challenges of code partitioning and system-level benchmarks because the benchmarks would have to evolve from the standard symmetric multi-processing ones that are available today. “In future, the road map for CPU manufacturers would be the addition of features like hardware virtualization so as to enhance processor performance and accelerators to boost application performance,” says Krishna.