Q2 Sees Server Growth Despite Midrange Decline

Taking a look at server sales in the second quarter showed that things have stayed pretty steady. This is extra good news considering there was a decreasing demand for midrange systems, according to research firm IDC. During this time, vendors as a whole saw their server revenue increase by 6.1% year over year to $13.5 billion. In addition to that, server shipments also increased by 3.2% from one year ago.

Moreover, revenue in the market also saw an increase on sales of higher-end servers and lower-end servers  used for hyperscale computing. However, the demand for midrange servers decreased by 5.4% year over year. This could be attributed to the recent ending of the x86 server refresh cycle, according to IDC.

In the second quarter, HP contained its top spot as the market leader with a share of 25.4%. The company's density-optimized servers were also in high demand as sales of the products saw a major increase of 119% year over year. Dell came in second place with a 17.5% share as its blade servers and rack servers experienced healthy growth.

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Coming in third place was IBM and the company was also the only vendor in the top five to see its market share and revenue fall during the quarterly period. IBM sold off its x86 server business to Chinese PC developer Lenovo last year and, as a result, its server revenue saw a hefty decrease of 32.9% year over year.

On the other hand, Lenovo saw its server revenue completely skyrocket by over 500%, which was a definite benefit from the acquisition deal with IBM. The China-based company is also hoping to become a major player in the server industry as it has begun diversifying away from its traditional market of PC sales. In addition to that, Lenovo also reached a statistical tie with Cisco for fourth place in the server market.

In terms of geography, the United States was the fastest-growing market for servers, with 12.6% year over year growth. The Asia Pacific region, which excludes Japan, came in second to the United States with 12% growth.

With the x86 server refresh cycle over we can probably assume that midrange servers will continue to see a decline. However, with the numbers of growth posted by both the high-end and low-end markets, we can also assume that the server market is going to steadily increase.

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Dell Debuts New PowerEdge R930 Server for Enterprise Workloads

Dell recently debuted its PowerEdge R930, an enterprise application of its PowerEdge server lineup. This new launch is a part of Dell's attempt at capturing more workloads, including analytics. The R930 is specifically aimed at the traditional enterprise running workloads, like enterprise and customer relationship management applications from Oracle and SAP.

Executive Director of Dell Server Solutions Brian Payne stated that the server replacement cycle will take around three to five years. However, Payne argues that performance improvements from Dell along with configurations and preintegrated applications from Cloudera, SAP HANA and Oracle should convince enterprises to upgrade. "The aim is to be future read," Payne adds.

Other enterprise vendors, like IBM, have already moved away from the x86 server market as a commodity business but Dell is arguing that this type of server is taking UNIX workloads. Sure there's still the cloud but Payne believes that there will be growth in hybrid data centers.

The PowerEdge R930 is as follows:

• 22% improvement on the SAP SD 2-Tier benchmark for a four-socket server
• 6TB of memory in 96 DIMMs
• 24 internal hard drives and support for SSD or hard drives
• Automation, reliability and availability  features and software

In addition to that, Dell has also pre-engineered appliances based on the PowerEdge R930. Payne noted that the majority customers buy the standard R9309. Dell has also updated the PowerEdge VRTX and PowerEdge M1000e converged systems.

Dell also announced the PowerEdge FC830 and M830 blade servers. These servers are designed for database, technical computing and virtualization. The FC830 and M830 both run up to 3TB of memory and up to 72 processing cores for the Intel Xeon E5-4600 v3 processors.

Dell hasn't listed any pricing or availability for the new systems but noted that integrated systems based on the PowerEdge R930 will be available later this year.

Content originally published here

Top Companies Looking at ELE Servers

Some of the top names in the computer industry, including Dell, HP and SeaMicro (which is owned by Advanced Micro Devices), are looking into developing low-power servers for data centers. Recent reports have indicated that extremely low-energy servers will take up 2.4% of the market for servers that run on Intel chips by the year 2015.

The key thing that these companies are looking into is energy costs due to the power needed to cool large server farms. Some of the newer data centers that have been built recently pack in tens of thousands of computer servers that generate internet content and cloud services.

According to Kiyomi Yamada, an analyst for Gartner, "Currently, the extremely low-energy server market consists of small providers, such as SeaMicro, now under AMD, and Super Micro. Some major OEMs including HP and Dell have announced that they would enter the market, as well as smaller vendors like Boston Limited."

AMD was a rather surprising addition to the market when it acquired SeaMicro back in February for $334 million. According to a recent report from Gartner, the worldwide server market reached $52.8 billion in 2011. Profit margins, however, were thin, causing vendors to look into branching out to emerging categories like extremely low-energy machines.

Source: Investors.com - HP, Dell, AMD Target Low-Energy Servers, A Hot Market

Dell Debuts New PowerEdge C8000 Series Servers

According to recent reports, Dell has unveiled some new servers based on designs that the company will soon be putting into effect in an upcoming 10-petaflop supercomputer known as Stampede. The servers being implemented, which are PowerEdge C8000 servers, use Intel x86 CPUs and offer the flexibility to include graphics processors or even more storage, allowing you to improve performance on database, high-performance computing or cloud computing.

Users will have the ability to experiment with graphics processors, storage, memory and other elements inside servers depending on their computing needs. A lot of inspiration for these servers came from the Stampede supercomputer itself, which is still in development.

The servers will be using Intel's Xeon eight-core E5-2600 processors and coprocessors, nicknamed Knights Corner, which are expected to increase the speed of scientific and mathematical calculations. The Stampede supercomputer is a compilation of thousands of C8000-series servers that has a total of 272TB of memory along with 14 petabytes of storage.

The chassis for the PowerEdge C8000 can have up to eight blade servers with each server having between two CPUs with 16 processing cores, two internal hard drives or other storage and networking options. The servers themselves are targeted towards hosting services, Web serving and other cloud applications, according to Dell's Product Manager Armando Acosta. There are two other versions of the server, the C8220X and the C8220. The C8220X is more advanced and allows for more RAM and storage, as well as an option to add graphics processors.

In addition to that, the servers can be hooked up to the new C8000XD storage box for expandable hard drive or SSD storage. The servers are also designed for deployment in highly parallel computing environments with their ability to fit graphics processors providing the capability to offer higher performance-per-watt and the internal hard drives offering more storage capacity. What's more is that the expandable storage box provides more long-term storage and caching for databases.

According to Dell, the new PowerEdge C8220 will have a starting price of $35,000 with eight blade servers in the chassis. The C8220X will start at $42,000 and the C8000XD somewhere between $25,000 and $27,000.

Source: Equities.com - Dell showcases new servers from supercomputer

Dell Announces PowerEdge C5220 Microserver with Ivy Bridge Xeon Chips

Dell recently announced an all new microserver that has Intel's first Xeon server processors that are based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. The funny thing is that the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture hasn't even been officially announced by the chip maker. The PowerEdge C5220 from Dell is one of the first servers with Xeon chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and is targeted at web 2.0, cloud and high-performance applications, according to Dell.

The server will run on Intel's Xeon E3-1200 V2 series of processors which are said to be faster and more power-efficient than the previous E3 chips that were based on Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. A spokesman for Intel said that the new chips provide more performance-per-watt, and a server with E3-1200 V2 processors drawing 17 watts of power in a 3U rack space could provide as much as 53% more performance than a 20-watt Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU.

According to Dell, the Xeon E3-1200 V2 chips draw between 17 to 45 watts of power and are made using the 22-nanometer process. In addition to that, these chips include 3D transistors, which are faster and more power-efficient than the 2D transistors that are found in the existing 32-nanometer process chips. Unfortunately, Intel was unable to disclose any other information on the new Xeon processors though the company did announce in April that it was planning on releasing its first Xeon server chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture towards the end of this quarter. These would be targeted at microservers, which are low-power servers with shared components designed primarily for web serving and cloud applications.

The PowerEdge C5520 is able to scale performance while simultaneously reducing the number of servers in a datacenter according to Dell. The company also noted that this new microserver has already helped one company consolidate four servers into one while running a software infrastructure based on the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) software stack. Dell says that the microserver will be available on May 22 for a starting price of $12,210.

Source: PC World - Dell Announces First Server With Intel's Ivy Bridge Xeon Chips

Asia-Pacific Server Market Experiences Growth

The first quarter of 2011 saw strong growth in the Asia-Pacific server market. Shipments rose 21% compared to the first quarter of 2010, just one year ago. In addition to that, server revenue increased 29% year-over-year.

The Australian market also experienced growth, however, the market growth was modest. Server revenue in the Australian market increased by 10% this quarter despite shipments falling 5% compared to last year's first quarter.

According to Erica Gadjuli, Gartner Principal Research Analyst, "Enterprise spending on server consolidation using virtualization technology continued to be a key driving factor for server market growth in this region." x86-based server sales also grew 21% in shipments as well as 31% in revenue.

IT investments in key verticals like financial services and the public sector led to year-on-year revenue growth in mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix servers. Mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix servers grew 137% and 15.3% respectively during the first quarter.

Blade Servers, which include x86 and non-x86 based, did better than the rest of the market by growing 38% by shipments and 68% in revenue year-over-year compared to other servers like rack mounted, rack optimized, tower and standalone.

The leader in the server market for the first quarter was HP with shipments with a 30% share overall in Asia-Pacific. IBM held the leadership position in revenue, accounting for 41% of the entire market.

Dell was second in shipments with 21.8%, followed by IBM with a 20% market share. Lenovo trailed in fourth with 5.1% with Huawei topping off the top five with 3.7%. All of these vendors in the Asia-Pacific region had their own moments of success during the first quarter of 2011 in both shipments and revenue, experiencing double digit growth year-over-year.

Source: ARN - Asia-Pacific server market on the rise

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Dell and Ubuntu Team Up for Linux Cloud Computing Technology

Canonical, one of the vendors of Ubuntu Linux, is expanding their cloud horizons thanks to a new cloud partnership they have formed with Dell. The partnership consists of Dell making the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) technology available on the Dell PowerEdge C2100 server as well as the Dell PowerEdge C6100 server. The UEC deal marks a huge milestone for Ubuntu as it moves from Dell desktops to Dell servers.

According to Nicolas Barcet, Ubuntu Server Product Manager, "It is the first offer that involves Ubuntu Server Edition at Dell so it's a major step extending the strong relationship we have had on Ubuntu Desktop and Netbook editions."

UEC has been a part of the Ubuntu Linux distro since Januty Jackalope was released in April 2009. Other releases by Ubuntu have improved the technology that is based on the open source Eucalyptus project. Ubuntu stated back in April 2010 that it had 12,000 active deployments of UEC with as many as 200 being added each day. This deal with Dell also involves a fair amount of money but an exact amount is unclear.

"Dell receives a share of the UEC Assist contracts it sells; details are not public. Dell does the entire sell, which includes the reselling of UEC Assist contracts," said Barcet.

There were some questions raised as to why Dell has decided to make UEC available now, and Barcet noted that Canonical and Dell have been working on making a simple yet stable deployment methodology. This methodology is reflected in both reference architecture documents as well as a set of pre-configuration files.

Barcet noted that UEC is not certified or integrated with other hardware from major system vendors other than Dell as of right now. UEC offers Ubuntu the ability to enable their infrastructure to run as either a private cloud deployment or a public cloud deployment. While the price utility of cloud computing has made it a good business investment for some companies, there are still challenges that need to be tackled.

According to Barcet, "Novelty of infrastructure as a service is the strongest barrier. We believe that seeing trusted partners join forces to provide an end-to-end solution will help establish the solution."

Source: Server Watch

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Server Markets Downward Spiral Begins to Slow

After a dismal first half of the year for the server market involving a large decline in sales and average selling prices (ASPs), it seems things aren't quite as bad as they could be. A third quarter server market survey from Gartner states that worldwide server revenues have continued to fall by 15.5 percent to $10.7 billion, and unit shipments are falling at an even faster pace down to 17.1 percent to 1.92 million units. At first glance these numbers may look bleak, but there is room for cautious optimism as we head into the fourth quarter and 2010.

The bright side of it all? The descent in sales and Average Selling Prices have begun to slow. Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, expresses his optimism for the server market. "It is important to put the yearly declines into perspective," said Hewitt in a statement. "Looking at the third quarter results from the sequential perspective, they showed an increase of 13.8 percent in shipments and 10.2 percent in revenues when compared to the second quarter of this year. That suggests that the market as a whole is showing signs of stabilization as we move toward the end of 2009." And indeed these numbers are a considerable improvement over the second quarter which was painful across the board. The second quarter showed a 30.4 percent plunge in unit shipment year-over-year which makes the 17.1 percent decline in quarter 3 seem like a large improvement.

Current Server Market Standings

In the third quarter, Gartner placed IBM at the top of the list once again with a total market share of 31.7 percent and $3.38 billion in total server sales, which are down 12.3 percent. IBM Mainframe sales and Power Systems sales were down while System X sales were up. Coming in at number 2 is Hewlett-Packard with a revenue decline of 15.1 percent to $3.22 billion and a market share of 30.2 percent . Dell came in third, with $1.42 billion in sales, down only 5.1 percent, and currently holds 13.4 percent of the market.

Sun Microsystems continues to suffer the worst of the losses with sales down 32.3 percent in the third quarter to $784.6 million. Sun's market share has dropped from 9.2 percent to 7.4 percent in just one year. Fujitsu, which sells servers using Sun's UltraSparc processor as well as x64 and Itanium processors, was down 10.8 percent to $550.2 million in revenue. Other niche vendors, such as Intel Itanium-based vendors and x86 providers have dropped a combined 23 percent year over year to $1.3 billion in sales.

Currently x86 servers account for 97 percent of the sales, which totals to 1.86 million units. Overall x86 unit sales have fallen by 16.2 percent while revenues fell by 11.4 percent to $6.32 billion. The Server Market was much harsher for RISC vendors - which are primarily Sun, Itanium and IBM Power-based servers. These RISC servers accounted for just three percent of total unit sales, but contributed 25 percent of overall sales revenue. This 3rd quarter RISC server sales fell by 37 percent on a unit basis year-over-year and 34.8 percent on a revenue basis. What's more, the defections to IBM and HP are really starting to show.

In the third quarter of 2008, Sun dominated 55.1 percent of the RISC market. However in Q3 of 2009, Sun only holds 44.0 percent. IBM on the other hand is up from 28.3 percent market share in 2008 to 33.6 percent in 2009, and HP saw an increase from 12.8 percent in 2008 to 17.8 percent share in 2009.

Used Server Sales

In tough economic times like we find ourselves in, resourceful IT Managers are looking for alternatives solutions to upgrading, updating or simply maintaining their servers and networking equipment. The used equipment market for servers and networking equipment is emerging as an excellent alternative to the high price of new equipment. Depending on their IT needs and the age of your equipment, Off Lease or Off Rent equipment may be a cost saving source for IT professionals and small companies alike.

Companies in the Technology Rental Business such as www.rentacomputer.com often have specials on equipment when it is returned from a Desktop Rental, a Laptop Rental, Audio Visual Rental and other types of equipment as well.

At the moment the special offer is on Entry Level Dell Servers. They are priced at $995. A refurbished Dell server just back from rentals is the perfect solution for a small business looking for, among other things, an affordable solution for file and print sharing. Here are the specifications:

Dell Poweredge 840 Server
Dual Core Xeon 1.86ghz processor
2GB Memory
Dual 160GB Hard Drives – Raid 1
CDROM Drive
Powervault 100T DAT72 Internal Tape Drive
Symantec Backup Exec Software
Windows Server 2003 with 5 user CALS

Here is the link.

If you have a need for Networking/ IT or standard PC equipment, don’t overlook used equipment from Rental Dealers, solid equipment for a fraction of the price of new.

By Bill Schiering

Server Sales Down

It is becoming harder and harder to close server sales in this economy. Client are trying to hang on to their capitol until the economy improves.

We are pushing leases so our clients can preserve their capitol.

Here is some info on falling server revenues for the last quarter.

5 Reasons to Lease File Servers:

1. Leasing improves your cash flow. The main advantage of leasing is that it frees up cash. Equipment leases rarely require down payments, though you may have to set aside some cash for a refundable security deposit. By contrast, loans to finance the purchase of equipment typically require down payments of up to 25 percent or more.
2. Leases are easier to finance than purchases. Before extending a capital equipment loan, banks will usually want to see two to three years of financial records — which most new companies do not have. Leasing companies, on the other hand, usually require only six months to a year of credit history before approving a furniture or office equipment lease.
3. Leasing makes it easier to keep pace with technology. Leasing is especially attractive if your business relies upon cutting-edge technology such as the latest computers, communications devices, or other equipment. A series of short-term leases will cost you less than buying new equipment every year or two. Some office equipment leases even have yearly computer upgrades built into them — eliminating that difficult decision of whether you can afford to upgrade or not.
4. Leasing allows you to afford more. While you might not be able to afford to purchase those pricey ergonomic chairs your employees are asking for, you may be able to lease them. Better furniture and equipment can create a more professional image and boost morale and productivity.
5. Leasing has balance sheet benefits. You may be able to exclude some leased assets and related obligations from your balance sheet. Such moves might improve financial indicators such as your firm's debt-to-equity ratio or earnings-to-fixed-assets ratio. Bear in mind, however, that accounting rules do require your balance sheet to report assets leased under certain types of agreements.