Tag: server

EMEA server market slides 10.5 percent

Posted on June 11, 2013 by - News, Products

server-racksThe EMEA server market seems unable to regain its footing. Following several consecutive quarters of lacklustre results, the negative trend seems set to continue, according to the latest IDC figures.

Revenue dropped 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 year-on-year. Shipments also dropped by 5.7 percent, to 520,000 units. This is the sixth quarter in the red and the market has been contracting since the fourth quarter of 2011.

IDC EMEA Enterprise Server Group research manager Giorgio Nebuloni said yearly revenue declined by more than 40 percent.

“Part of the spending intended to keep core business applications running is now absorbed by new integrated system offerings combining x86 and lower-end RISC/EPIC blades with storage and networking back-ends,” Nebuloni said.

The non-x86 market was especially hard hit, with a revenue decline of 34.8 percent. Revenues generated by x86 server dropped by 1.5 percent. Demand for x86 servers in developed European economies is flat, while demand for non-x86 gear is plummeting.

“RISC sales were particularly hit, down by 49.8% year on year, whereas mainframe revenue suffered single-digit declines of 4.8%” said IDC EMEA Enterprise Server Group senior research analyst Beatriz Valle. “Big organisations in the corporate space and government are consolidating existing infrastructure using high-end x86 servers, with demand for legacy architectures at an all time low.”

Demand is evaporating in the CEMA region as well, with a third consecutive drop in the first quarter. Shipments were down 9.7 percent, although some positive trends were seen in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile the share of modular server shipments increased from 19.9 percent to 22.7 percent in the first quarter of the year. The growth was driven by the increasing popularity of density optimised servers in the HPC area.

HP talks up the unsinkable Itanium

Posted on April 24, 2013 by - News

Der Untergang der TitanicWhile many in the industry have been writing off HP lately, the maker of expensive printer ink says that it is about to make a comeback, but has made Itanium  part of its cunning plan.

At the unveiling of Odyssey, a project ” to redefine the future of mission-critical computing”, HP said it wanted to transform the server market.

Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems, HP, Martin Fink told All Africa that HP’s plan is more cunning than a distributed network of foxes wired up in a supercomputer of cunning.

HP has in its hands a roadmap which annex UNIX and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance, cure cancer and put everything in a single platform.

Fink said that these days organizations were challenged with increasingly tough service-level agreements and all sorts of terrible pressure to be efficient with their IT budgets.

HP reasons that in a perfect world they would have the availability and resilience of UNIX-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of x86.

So HP is coming up with a development roadmap includes ongoing innovations to HP Integrity servers, HP nonstop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems.

The roadmap also includes delivering blades with Intel Xeon processors for the HP Superdome 2 enclosure and the scalable c-Class blade enclosures , while fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years, Fink said.

After HP released “DragonHawk,” its customers have been asking HP to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure.

He touted project Odyssey as something that HP partners would really want because it offered a “Intel’s continued innovation with a multigenerational Itanium processor roadmap”, combined with existing and future mission-critical capabilities of Intel Xeon processors, allow HP and Intel to provide customers with greater flexibility and choice.

Together with HP, he said that Intel would be able to give customers the ability to do mission-critical computing on their terms, with a broad range of operating systems and applications, he added with a straight face.

Lenovo to sell servers and storage

Posted on April 3, 2013 by - News

lenovo-logoLenovo, the world’s second largest PC maker, is planning to revamp its business strategy and refocus on its server and storage business over the next three years.

The PC slump has been hurting Lenovo, Dell and Hewlett Packard for several quarters and all traditional PC markers are now trying to reinvent themselves.

Dell wants to go private, HP is waiting for inkjet printers to make a comeback, while Lenovo seems keen focus on everything other than PCs.

Although its latest announcement indicates that Lenovo will make a serious enterprise server and storage push, it should be noted that the company is also betting big on smartphones and tablets. However, we don’t get to see that many of them in Europe, but Lenovo’s mobile gear is doing incredibly well in parts of Asia. In fact, Lenovo’s smartphone business accounts for about 20 per cent of the company’s revenue in mainland China, reports China Daily.

“We are looking for future profit generators, and the enterprise-level server and storage markets will surely fill that need,” said Chen Xudong, senior vice-president and general manager of Lenovo China. However, Chen stopped short of outlining Lenovo’s expectations for its server and storage gear.

The storage strategy seems off to a good start. On Tuesday Lenovo and EMC released their first co-branded server and storage products. The two outfits formed a joint venture last year to shift server and storage gear. It is hoped that the EMC alliance will help Lenovo fend off challenges from ZTE and Huawei in the Chinese market.