Blades cut wide swath through server market

USA: Global blade server shipments are expected to nearly quadruple from 2006 to 2011, according to iSuppli Corp.—not a bad accomplishment for a product that’s only six years old.

Worldwide blade server shipments will increase to 2.4 million units in 2011, rising at a CAGR of 31.5 percent from 620,000 in 2006. Blades will account for nearly 21.6 percent of all server shipments in 2011.

The blade server is a very young technology, tracing its roots back only six years. To fulfill the needs of dot-com technology providers, Houston-based RLX Technologies — now part of Hewlett-Packard Co. — shipped the first blade server in March 2001. Due to disappointing sales, a number of vendors did not refresh their initial blade server product lines. However, Hewlett-Packard and IBM continued to introduce new generations of blade server products that were increasingly suitable for enterprise clients. As the blade server platform began to gain traction, Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. rejoined the market at the end of 2006.

iSuppli defines the blade as a modular server based on a single motherboard incorporating microprocessor(s), memory and network interface. However, the blade may omit a number of components in order to free up space and to reduce power consumption, along with other considerations. The result is a server platform that when combined with other blades, can be physically arranged in an extremely dense way.

“With the advantages of high density, flexibility, power savings and simplified manageability, coupled with efforts from key blade server technology vendors to promote the interoperability of their products, iSuppli believes that blade servers will be the fastest-growing segment of the server market during the next few years,” said Peter Lin, senior analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli.

With the growing enthusiasm for virtualization and consolidation, the industry could be considered to be back-tracking on its blade server deployments, realizing that ad-hoc deployment of low-cost hardware on a one-application/ one-server basis is not the right direction for infrastructure design and management. Therefore, virtualization could be considered a correction of this strategy, Lin noted.

The emergence of multicore microprocessor architectures and virtualization technologies will restrict worldwide server shipments. However, any server acquired for use as a virtualization server will have a higher technical specification, and therefore a higher Average Selling Price (ASP). While unit shipment growth is likely to be hampered to some degree by virtualization, the key metric is revenue, as the higher ASP of servers acquired for virtualization should compensate for the smaller volumes.

iSuppli believes that if the progress on virtualization, product interoperability and multicore, low-power-consumption microprocessors proceeds well during the next few years, then the blade server market will capture more and more share from other form factors. Therefore, iSuppli believes the blade is the optimized form factor of choice for servers.