Servers saw another year of growth, with all vendors doing brisk business. While x-86 servers became more powerful, with vendors offering more dual- to multi-processing, the RISC/UNIX market retained its traditional strengths with high-end application demands driving the market.

Energy efficiency emerged as a key factor with green becoming the most used marketing buzzword. HP and Dell made impressive gains in the x-86 space over the year, while players like Acer had a rather dull year. Clearly, the market is getting divided: some vendors are predominantly targeting the PC-based business while players like Dell are getting more comprehensive in their system portfolio and are getting a larger footprint in the systems space.

HP, with a revenue of Rs 1,056 crore, impressed with a growth of 25.8%. Dell grew 22.9%. The growth in x-86 servers meant a growth in share for the other vendors.

The x-86 Market
The x-86 market, composed of both Intel and AMD configurations, grew by 22.4% by units, from 107,000 in FY 07 to 131,000 in FY 08. Industry experts say that the growth has been more balanced over the year and across all segments and categories of x-861P, 2P, 4P, and blades, predominantly in the 2P and 4P categories. However, vendors say that 1P grew most in India with a lot of technology intake in the mid-market.

First time users in newer ecosystems, as a part of global inven-tory management, went in for 1P configurations. 1P servers grew from 27k to 38k; 2P from 78k to 87k; 4P from 4k to 5k, and blades from 6k to 13k unit shipments. 4P alone registered an impressive 25% growth. The above makeup of the server market reflects the complex workloads happening on the enterprise front. For instance, the robustness of Windows and Linux is seeing the move to 4P, which was traditionally on propriety servers. This pushed the envelope of scalability, robustness and the market-shift, and the acceptance of x-86 for complex workloads.

Blades, meanwhile, have grown by 100%. The extreme end of x-86 where blades are adopted are in data centers where the servers, thermal management and space are primary concerns. Vendors say that blades are the reflection of the maturity of the market.

If we look at the vendor-wise performance, HPs domination in the server space continues. According to company sources, HP attacked the 1P, 2P and 4P server category, and with x-86 blades. It shipped close to 42,000 units and garnered a 32% market share. In blades, HP dominated with 7,500 units of the overall 13k market with more than 50% market-share. The 2P, which is the mainstream category and has done well globally, is a horizontal growth segment and is driven by traditional buyers.

A 300% growth, from 2,800 units the previous year to 7,500 units in FY 08 signifies a massive ramp-up by HP in the blade space. This aggression was due to its market development focused product design for the segment. HP sold 4P and blades in the value market and developed markets and products in the volume market. Sources say that it will adopt the same strategy the ongoing year too. HPs aggressive growth is attributed to the breadth of products it has and to product affordability. Its x-86 server range starts from as low as Rs 25k and goes up to Rs 1 lakh.

HP retained its leadership position in x-86 with an impressive 34.7% growth in unit terms, while IBM saw a small decline in unit shipments. The non x-86 growth was however minimal

IBM, meanwhile, focused on the System x Servers with embedded virtualization technology and the companys latest chipset for Intels quad-core Xeon processors. IBM pitched in on aspects like scalability and its blade center offerings. On server front, IBM concentrated on virtualization, consolidation and green (on the data center side). IBM also concentrated on building next generation data centers with emphasis on better server manageability and energy efficiency. In the bargain, it aggressively sold concepts like consolidation and virtualization. On the HPC side, IBM has customer wins like IISc and in mid-markets, the power series also saw good demand.

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