August 18, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Independent research firm TheInfoPro (theinfopro.net) announced on Monday that by 2010, blade server providers will witness a significant turnaround in a market that is currently at a relative standstill.
According to Wave 6 of the Servers Study (brainshark.com/theinfopro/serv-pr1), 31 percent of survey participants say that they are skeptical and have little interest in blade servers or that blade servers don't apply to them.
However, by 2010, nearly 40 percent of enterprises project that over 75 percent of all new servers installed will be blade-based.
"Because of the recent focus on reducing data center carbon footprints and the implementation of virtualization to accomplish this reduction, blade servers have been pushed to the back burner," says Bob Gill, managing director of server research for TheInfoPro. "The increased density of blades, coupled with concerns over environmental issues such as concentrated heat output, are among the key reasons that organizations have put off procuring blade servers."
According to the results of the study, the current blade server market shows that 46 percent of server pros believe that blades are critical or valuable to their current business objectives, down from 58 percent in Wave 5, 25 percent of end users that do not see a role for blades over the long term, 20 percent of the market have not installed blades, and 25 percent indicating that blades make up between 1 percent and 5 percent of all servers.
In regards to the future of the blade server market, nearly 40 percent of enterprises project that over 75 percent of all new servers installed in 2010 will be blade-based, and while over 40 percent report that they currently do not have any blades hosting virtualization, nearly 40 percent expect that over 75 percent of their blades will be virtual hosts by 2010.
Over 160 one-on-one, hour-long interviews were conducted with Fortune 1000 and midsize enterprise end users for the Wave 6 Server Study, including Aperture Technologies, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Foundry Networks, HP, IBM, Linux, Microsoft, Nortel, Opsware, Rackable Systems, Red Hat, Sun, and VMWare.
The companies gave insight on their server adoption plans, management strategies, and vendor performance with regard to key technologies.
