Non-x86: Unix for All
Unix has always been a powerful force and its position as the industry standard operating system is time tested. For the year that went by, Unix servers held their sway with demand from large enterprises to even SMBs. In volume terms the total Unix shipments stood at 8,597 units, a growth of 11.4% over the previous fiscal. HP aggressively targeted the large enterprises with its RISC/EPIC/Itanium offerings on the Integrity server platform. It forged big deals with BSNL, RBI, Hutch, Idea, Bank of Baroda and BPCL.

The flavor of the year was clearly interoperability with vendors offering multiple OS compatibility in the Unix space. Sun Microsystems, the key player in the Unix space, also saw good account acquisitions and repeat orders in the period under consideration. It rolled out Unix deployments for large enterprises like Reliance Retail, Reliance Communications, Punjab National Bank and ICICI.

IBM India managed to pull off a major achievement on the Unix front last fiscal by announcing record-setting performance results. In the recent scalability benchmark, reviewed by Ernst & Young, Finacle on IBM System p servers surpassed its own previous record as the most scalable core banking solution in the world.

A key thought that IBM was able to drive home last year in the Unix space was the ability of its offerings to bring in an adaptive computing environment. It delivered its power architecture together with AIX 5L and Linux OS. IBM also offered its Virtualization Engine with capacity and demand planning functionalities built in. With a slew of such powerful products IBM reinforced its presence in the Unix space.

More Blade Runners
In the past two years the ascendancy of blade servers in various demanding computing environments has been pretty impressive. With a lower per-server power envelope and higher computing power, blades pulled through another glorious year. What drives blades are the distinct benefits that they bring to the table. For instance, blades bring in a high degree of server manageability, virtualization, and simplified network and storage management. Blades consume less power, which translate into huge cost savings for the enterprise. But, despite these benefits, the blade market is yet to create a significant impact in the mainstream server space. Today the blade server application scenarios are largely limited to data centers and high performance computing. To change that, all vendors upped their presence in this category last fiscal. It is certainly an area that will significantly ramp up in terms of volumes in the days ahead.

The blade server market used to be a three horse race with IBM, HP and Dell battling for market share. As per IDC India, HP garnered a whopping 71% share in the blade server market in unit terms, in JFM 07. But a look at the market composition over the last fiscal reveals that there has been an active presence of other vendors like Wipro, Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems offering an array of blade products. With multiple vendors offering various blade configurations, the market for blades is certainly expanding. IBM has also built a world class solution center in Bangalore that has the capability to test and benchmark applications. Interested enterprises can get trained on its blade center technologies. Similarly, HP created a Blade Demo Center in Mumbai where customers can have a first hand experience of its blade offerings. Sun Microsystems came out with its Modular 8000 blade series designed specifically for high-end x86 computing.

From Clovertown to Barcelona
Looking at FY 07, the battle between Intel and AMD manifested itself in the form of more powerful servers and multi-core processors. Last year saw the multi-core battle taking new dimension with the launch of Intel quad-core Xeon 5300, nicknamed Clovertown, well ahead of AMDs Barcelona quad-core chips. The Barcelona chip from AMD would be a major update to its popular Opetron server processors. Initial reports suggest that Barcelona has secured some leading performance benchmarks from the floating point perspective. The current fiscal would be the year of multi-core processors that will resultantly bring about more powerful servers. Moreover, there is a likelihood of lines getting blurred between the x86 and non-x86 segments as the former gets powered by more powerful processors.

Continuing with existing trends the Unix systems will ride on OS heterogeneity and many Unix users will look at concepts like virtualization and consolidation, even though these concepts may be in the initial stages.

Shikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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