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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Cloud Expansions Boosting Server Sales

This year server vendors saw the biggest growth in shipments in over 4 years so far. This is mainly due to the continued investments in the hyperscale server infrastructures that power all of the private and public cloud services. So this is a really big year for the industry, the best since the huge economic downturn a few years back. In the first quarter shipments grew by 13%, which is about 2.7 million units shipped out. Revenue grew by 18%, equaling a staggering $13.4 billion.

There is a really strong demand for the hyperscale area in the United States, which is driving the growth we are seeing. Hyperscale is a term that describes the systems that use thousands of servers to provide power to cloud and big data infrastructures. Every form factor is in more demand too, including rack-optimized, blade, density-optimized, and tower servers.

Hewlett-Packard was the number one vendor in revenue and in volume, closely followed by Dell in the number two spot. Hewlett-Packard rack-optimized servers are in very high demand at the moment. Even though their server business is pretty small compared to everything else they offer, they experience a huge amount of revenue growth compared to this time last year.

Oddly enough, even though there was so much growth in the server department, they weren't able to keep up with the competition. Overall, their revenue share dropped from 25.5% to 23.8% and it's marketing share by volume dropped 2.6% points down to 20%. Last week, Hewlett-Packard said that they are planning on splitting up into two separate companies later this year. One company would be selling enterprise equipment and services while the other company would be selling the standard PCs and printers.

Dell is kind of in the same boat. They had increased revenue and shipments but were not able to keep up with the rest of the market. Dell's share of revenue and shipments both slipped by just under 1 percentage point leaving them at 17.1% and 19%. They did, however, see revenue growth in rack-optimized products and density-optimized servers as well.

HP and Dell were at the top of the market when it came to revenue and shipments, but product mix made for some differences between the rest of the top five rankings by revenue and shipments. IBM was in third place for server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems. Lenovo was number three in server shipments ahead of Huawei Technologies and Inspur Electronics.

While HP and Dell led the market by both revenue and shipments, product mix led to some differences between the rest of the top five rankings by revenue and shipments. IBM had the third-largest server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems, while Lenovo was third by server shipments, ahead of Huawei Technologies and Inspur Electronics. Lenovo and IBM's numbers were also of course affected by Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's x86 server business.

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Cisco has a revenue growth of 44.4% from last year which is way above average. Their blade server business is also growing and getting more revenue from blade servers than every company on the list besides Hewlett-Packard.

It's good to see the server industry see growth. Cloud computing has driven business in other sectors of technology and the server industry was definitely in need of a pick-me-up.

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Microsoft Phasing Out Old Technology That People Still Use

Microsoft is getting ready to do away with some old software yet again. The only problem is that pretty much everyone is still using it. Now, if companies don't upgrade, they will be left defenseless against hackers... And we all remember what happened last time.

Even though most businesses still use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 the company is still ending support for this software on July 14th of this year. No more patches are going to come out for it after that. This is pretty terrible considering most of the computers that process everything at all of those websites you shop at are using the software. Not just that, but apparently 21% of all servers everywhere are running Windows Server 2003, and 97% of data centers still use it as well. That is a staggering number! Unless all of those companies upgrade immediately, there are probably going to be some serious issues popping up this summer.

Even if the companies do decide to upgrade, for some reason it apparently takes 200 days to upgrade. I'm not a computer genius or a rocket scientist, but that seems pretty extreme. This means there is going to be a gap of at least a couple of months where servers will be prone to hacking threats. This is exactly how hospitals lost 4.5 million patent records last year. Not only that, but we all remember when they dropped support for Windows XP and a ton of ATM machines were exposed to attacks. It was so bad that the Chinese government banned Windows 8 from all government computers.

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Now, if you own a company and don't plan on upgrading... You CAN pay for custom support. The only catch is that it will cost you a quarter of a million dollars per year. Doesn't seem like such a good idea. It seems like they are really pushing people hard to upgrade here. If you haven't yet, it is certainly something to think about. Quickly.

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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.

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Serious Vulnerability To Virtualized Servers Discovered In Xen Project

The Xen Project has revealed last month a lot of details on a serious vulnerability in the Xen hypervisor, one that could put the security of a lot of virtualized servers at risk. Xen is a free, open-source hypervisor that is used to create and run virtual machines and is widely used by providers of cloud computing and virtual private server hosting companies.

The security vulnerability forced Amazon Web Services and Rackspace to reboot some of their customer's virtualized servers when it was discovered. Amazon and Rackspace were among some of the major cloud providers that Xen disclosed the vulnerability to, which is being tracked as CVE-2014-7188.

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This vulnerability allows a virtual machine created using Xen's hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) to read data that is stored by other HVM guests sharing the same physical hardware. This vulnerability breaks a crucial security barrier in multi-tenant virtual environments. A malicious HVM guest could exploit the vulnerability to crash the host server, according to a security advisory published by the Xen Project.

The vulnerability only affects Xen running on x86 systems and does not affect ARM or servers virtualized with Xen's paravirtualization (PV) mode instead of HVM. Regardless, the issue is likely to affect a very large number of servers. Amazon was forced to reboot nearly 10% of its Elastic Cloud Computer (EC2) servers and a similar effort from Rackspace affected a quarter of its 200,000 customers.

Amazon scheduled a zone by zone reboot so that they didn't affect two regions or availability zones at the same time. According to a statement released by the company, "The zone by zone reboots were completed as planned and we worked very closely with our customers to ensure that the reboots went smoothly for them."

Rackspace was not as fortunate as Amazon in its process to fix the issue. Taylor Rhodes, CEO of Rackspace, sent out an email to customers about the vulnerability and Rackspace's efforts to correct it and in it stated that the company "dropped a few balls" in the process. "Some of our reboots, for example, took much longer than they should and some of our notifications were not as clear as they should have been. We are making changes to address those mistakes," Rhodes stated.

The problems with this seem to have been fixed but you can be sure that the Xen Project is still working on making sure that something like this doesn't happen again.

Cloud Computing Is Changing The Way That We Use Servers

There are not too many people out there who are familiar with virtual servers. To many people that even know what a server is, they view it as a large tower of green lights that holds all your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Many companies will use their own personal servers so that everyone who is connected to those servers can access company data and files. It's one of the sure fire ways to help keep company and personal data safe. Think of the servers that a company uses as massive storage decks. They're able to back up all of their files on these servers, store data, and access whatever file or project they might need to access all from the servers. The only thing is that we are becoming more digital. We are starting to digitize many of our services. Sending mail and letters turned into Email and texting. Now, our servers are becoming more digital because of cloud computing.

What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is a very hard term to define. It all comes down to what you feel the "Cloud" is. There are many who find it to be anything you can get on a virtual server over the internet. There are others who think that it's another fancy term for whatever consumable content you can find on the internet. Neither of these answers are wrong, necessarily. Cloud computing is also referred to in a more commercial view point. It is thought that it can be defined as "encompassing any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the internet, extends IT's existing capabilities." Essentially, anything that has a separate virtual server for it's services or applications that you have to access via the service's provider can be considered cloud computing.

What's The Difference Between Them?
It may not seem like there is too much of a difference between the two different servers (virtual and real), and in a way there isn't. They are both there to hold specific data programmed by the IT specialists that work for that specific service or company. One is physical and the other is accessed over the internet. Take utility computing for example. This concept might not be "new", but its slowly becoming more cloud integrated. Many larger companies, like Amazon, are seeing to it that that happens. While it may not be used for anything pertaining to how the service or application operates, it can help add more capacity for the site to run smoothly and even allow for more storage space. The fact is that instead of IT needing to go down to the server room to get to the server and fix or alter something, cloud computing makes it easier because they can just access the networks virtual server to alter what they need to alter.

It's On The Rise
Cloud computing is slowly beginning to take off as time goes by. Software is being offered as a service through virtual servers. It's gotten to the point now that even development environments are being offered as services through servers. There are restrictions though. The application that's being developed is based off of the infrastructure of the provider. Your app's service is then delivered to the users via the provider's internet as well. All of these services are being offered through virtual servers as it's easier for IT to make changes and help. Some even view it as more cost effective. If companies can offer services to develop, deliver, and access services and applications via a cloud server, that only means that it's becoming more popular than people think.

Now just because we are getting more virtual with our servers doesn't mean that it's still the safest route to go. Having our services and apps become more easily accessible is a plus, but that also means that it can be more easily hacked if certain precautions aren't taken.

One thing is for sure though, there is a lot more to cloud computing and cloud technology that backing up your music on iCloud.

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Intel Introduces Skylake Chips For PCs And Tablets, Sets Pace For Wireless Desktops

Intel recently demoed the first PC running a next-generation chip based on the new Skylake architecture. Skylake is set to hit PCs and tablets in the second half of 2015. A desktop PC with the chip was recently shown off by Intel running 4K video during an on-stage demonstration that the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. According to General Manager of Intel's PC Client Group Kirk Skaugen, "You should expect a significant increase in performance, battery life and power efficiency."

Processors based on the Skylake architecture will take the place over the chips based on the Boradwell architecture, which has been delayed following issues with the manufacturer. Broadwell was introduced in Core M chips recently and is the fifth-generation of Core chips focused on tablets. The chip architecture itself is expected to be in mainstream desktops and laptops in the first half of 2015 as well.

Skylake's release date was questioned recently due to the announcement of the Broadwell delay. Skaugen was speaking with a lot of confidence about Skylake and its release and tried to stamp out any rumors and doubts about the architecture's release. In addition to that, Skaugen also stressed that the chip will be in desktops, laptops and tablets by the end of 2015. In addition to that, the Skylake chips will be made using the 14nm process, which is the same one Broadwell uses, though Skylake will have an all new chip design.

Skylake will also set the tone for wire-free computing on PCs, according to Skaugen. Intel will provide a reference platform that is based on the chip, which could reduce cable clutter in both PCs and tablets. Sakugen said that the overall goal is to enable wireless charging and data streaming between PCs and peripherals.

The reference design has a need for a laptop on a dock in order to enable wireless charging. Intel is making a dock that is based on WiGig wireless technology. WiGig is three times faster than WFi 802.11ac. This will allows PCs to stream data wirelessly to monitors and exchange date with external storage devices. In addition to that, the new tech could reduce the need for ports like DisplayPort, HDMI and USB 3.0 in PCs.

Wireless tech is certainly making waves, though there are still limitations that are struggling to catch on. Wireless charging is doing some nice things but it still isn't quite ready to catch on. The thought of having a completely wireless desktop setup sure is sweet, however. Wireless peripherals are already popular but having wireless speakers and monitors would just be so convenient. We'll see how this new Skylake architecture takes off when it is in widespread use next year.