There has been much talk about Blades technology over the past few years. The Blade concept emerged a few years ago and the market has grown steadily since then. Many research companies have been riding this wave, poking and prodding the architecture for strengths and weaknesses, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages, and even sizing the market as it has grown.
We thought it would be interesting to introduce another data point to assess the growth of Blades in the market. To see if that reflected the other indicators as to the growth of the market.
The Ideas International Competitive Profiles CPSystems service includes coverage of servers from small single core entry-level systems right up to highly scalable UNIX based servers. Competitive Profiles has been tracking Blade technologies since they entered the market a few years ago and was recently enhanced to provide even more effective coverage. It is used by the buy and sell side of the industry to keep informed on product developments.
If we assume that interest in a particular type of technology is related to activity in the marketplace, would our Competitive Profiles usage statistics reflect that interest and reveal any interesting trends? Does the usage and hence interest reflect the growth in Blades technology that we are hearing about from other quarters? And how is this affecting the traditional entry level server market, where many companies are considering moving away from rack-based servers to Blade technology solutions?
The chart below plots usage within Competitive Profiles, reflecting interest in Blades and Entry-level server technologies over the past couple of years.
Blades first started to appear around 2003 and understandably came off a small base. Since then interest has steadily grown, with a picking up of the pace in 2007. Although we are only part of the way through 2008, projecting our 2008 partial year usage to a full year estimate (not charted), then 2008 appears it will follow the accelerated interest from 2007, suggesting that Blades reached an inflection point around 2006/07 using this data.
At the same time, this data suggests a flattening of the interest in entry-level servers of late and this has happened in a similar timeframe to the pickup in Blades interest, which suggests that there may be some leakage across to the Blade technologies. However, despite the rise of Blades it would appear that interest in traditional entry-level servers remains strong, which today is a big market for the vendors as reflected in the chart, by the size of interest in entry-level servers compared to Blades. Only last week we saw a new entrant into the market in the US in the form of Lenovo, who released five entry level servers. So we would expect that the entry-level servers will be around for some time yet.
So does this data reinforce the other sources? It would appear so.
It must be remembered that the data is based just on usage of IDEAS’ Competitive Profiles service and is not a reflection of research into actual sales or intent to buy etc. and so cannot be considered serious research into the issue. However, it would appear that the usage to some extent may be reflecting trends being reported by other sources, which makes an interesting observation item and an interesting ‘other’ indicator into what appears to be happening in the market itself.
In your opinion, is the above data a good reflection of your experiences for Blades growth? Do you think Blades will overtake traditional servers anytime soon? And if so why? We would be interested in your opinions. Use the comments link below to tell us what you think.
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