By Theo Priestley, Consultant at ITredux
According to both Gartner and IDC worldwide server market revenue has fallen by up to 5%, with major server manufacturers taking a hit. The figure doesn’t appear big but the impact and shift to Cloud is starting to make its mark. But the biggest shifts will be taking place further in the future as organizations move to downsize their infrastructure and run their business on smaller IT footprints.
…Will the Micro Server become a reality?
The server market figures might actually be a blip for the following reasons;
Firms move towards server farms hosted by a third party, reducing spend internally on larger IT assets but large farms still require these assets so spend will level out
Hardline negotiations are taking place where once server OEMs had a business by the short and curlies, orgs now have a number of choices at their disposal
But the biggest trend shift will happen not in the size of the revenue but the physical size of kit required by businesses internally. I posted a quirky article recently which suggested that all you’d need to run a business was a box the size of an Apple TV.
What if a box as small as the Apple TV was all you needed to run your business ?
Mainframe is becoming extinct…
Software is becoming leaner, faster…
Cloud is digitally pervasive…
In-Memory data and parallel processing across an Internet of Things will be a reality…
Startup businesses are becoming leaner, more agile…
And all you’d need to run it all is a 3x3x1 inch block!
As companies embrace Cloud, whether in full or hybrid, the likelihood of massive IT spend on server hardware becomes more in question and in reality OEMs need to move with this. The logical way is to start downsizing the physical requirements of server technology to almost a slave unit as the majority of heavy lifting for an organization is done by the Cloud provider.
The worldwide server market isn’t dying on its feed because of Cloud, it’s just going to undergo a radical change in configuration. Which means both hardware and software has to change with it. Developers used to squeeze everything into 5kb once, there’s no reason it can’t happen again,
And the tiny box sitting under your TV might just be pointing to the future of infrastructure in a few years time.
