IDC Reports on Server
Market
FRAMINGHAM, Mass.
- November 23, 2005 - According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server
Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew at 8.1% year over
year to $12.5 billion in the third quarter of 2005, marking the 10th consecutive
quarter of positive overall revenue growth.
Volume server revenue
grew 14.8% year over year.
The top 4 vendors ranked by server revenue
were:- (1) IBM, (2) HP, (3) Dell and (4) Sun.
Linux servers posted
their 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with year-over-year
revenue growth of 34.3% and unit shipments up 20.5%.
Unix servers
experienced a 0.4% decline in factory revenue year over year, while unit
shipments declined 13.7% when compared with 3Q04. Worldwide Unix revenues of
more than $3.9 billion for the quarter represented 31.7% of overall quarterly
factory revenue.
"Although there was continued IT investment across all three
server classes, the volume and midrange enterprise server segments are showing
the strongest growth, speaking to IT purchasers' continuing focus on cost
containment, which is often achieved through strategic server consolidation and
server virtualization initiatives," said Matt Eastwood, program vice
president of Worldwide Server Research at IDC.
Sun's server revenue in
this quarter was approximately $1.1 billion, a 7.6% decline from the
same period in 2004.
IDC,
Market research
Editor's
comments:- ever since the dotcom bubble burst I've noticed that Sun's retelling
of this type of server market report reads like a completely different version
of the story. Whereas, in the original plot, Sun's leg has been eaten by a
shark and Sun fades out of the novel after having managed to swim ashore... The
Sun PR version usually has a happier ending in which Sun eats the shark,
slays a dragon, rescues the girl and keeps the treasure.
For a story
with a real dragon, and a real girl (but no treasure) read my novella -
Princess Laura and the
Unsuitable Dragon Suitors.
STORAGEsearch Discusses Pivotal Shift in 2005 Storage Market
Editor:- November 22, 2005 -
STORAGEsearch.com today revealed the biggest event in the storage market
in 2005.
The
Sun /
StorageTek merger
gets a mention, but that wasn't the really BIG Thing. Want to know what was?
...read the
article
Repainting the Dawn of Sun's SPARC Market Legend
Editor:- November 17,
2005 - this week, with the kind help of Robert B Garner who was the lead
architect of SPARC and co-designer of the Sun-4/200, I've been making some
corrections and updates to the early dates and facts in our very popular SPARC
History article.
Written nearly 10 years ago, and first
published in 1996 - this article reviews the first decade of the SPARC systems
market (1987 to 1996) and discusses the market factors in play at the time, key
events and milestones. Surprisingly it's one of the most popular articles in
the SPARC Product Directory.
The article also includes links to all archived news stories about
the Sun, SPARC and Solaris market in the period 2000 to 2005. The news stories
first appeared in our SPARC
news page. The article also links to more recent annual SPARC market
summaries for readers who are trying to understand how we got here. ...read the article
Sun's New 8 Way SPARC Chip will Slash Server Count and Cost
Editor:-
November 14, 2005 - Sun Microsystems - today announced the introduction
of its revolutionary UltraSPARC T1 processor - formerly known as "Niagara".
The T1 includes 8 processor cores, each of which can run 4 threads.
Sun says that the 1.2GHz chip will deliver similar performance to theoretical
9.6GHz single core processors from competing architectures. Such chips aren't
available, but the new T1 signals Sun's intention to regain its long lost lead
in the CPU performance stakes.
Sun says that the T1 effectively puts
the processing power of a server rack in a chip. But the T1 is surprisingly
energy efficient - consuming less than half the power of competing processors.
The UltraSPARC T1 will ship in new Sun servers before the end of 2005.
Sun
predicts that its new processor could slash the number of web servers needed by
customers in half. If you add in the factor in that
solid state disk
accelerators can halve the amount of servers needed on a typical high end
network - then pretty soon the computer market will hardly need any new servers
at all - just a quarter of what is shipped now.
What's in a name? -
The last time I remember a processor having the "T1" moniker - was the
T212 Transputer made by Inmos.
I played around with the T212 chip in
1986. It was a very fast processor for its time, and like its relation - the T2
(32 bit) and later T800 (32 bit with floating point maths) was marketed as a
RISC chip with support for parallel processing. But the development environment
was dreadful and the processors had a number of architectural flaws. The
parallel interconnections in the Transputer family were too slow to be of much
benefit (20Mbps), and the lack of cache support meant that you only got good
performance using state of the art expensive SRAM. Let's hope that Sun's T1 is
a lot more successful. Unlike the original Transupters, Sun's UltraSPARC T1 has
got an operating system. Not Windows, not Linux. Can you remember what it's
called? SPARC Trivia
Quiz,
Interview
with Stanislaw Lem,
article:- Looking
Back at 3rd Party SPARC Technology Firsts
Curtiss-Wright Controls Debuts Dual-Channel Gigabit Ethernet PMC
San
Diego CA - November 14, 2005 - Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
has introduced the PGE2, a new dual-port GigE PMC card.
Powered
by an Intel 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller, the PGE2 is fully compatible
with legacy 10/100BASE-TX networks and simplifies the addition of GigE
networking into existing VME, CompactPCI or PCI embedded systems.
"Gigabit Ethernet is quickly moving onto Defense and Aerospace
platforms," said Lynn Patterson, vice president and general manager of
Modular Solutions, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. "The PGE2 is
ideal for embedded system designers who want high bandwidth data communications,
but don't want to waste valuable slots."
This new GigE PMC card is available in both air-cooled and
conduction-cooled versions.
...Curtiss-Wright
Controls profile,
military SPARC
systems, add-in
cards for Sun
Sun Reports Results
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - November 1, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal first quarter, which ended September 25, 2005.
This period that included results of operations from SeeBeyond
Technology Corporation, which Sun acquired on August 25, 2005, and Storage
Technology Corporation, which Sun acquired on August 31, 2005.
Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 were $2.726 billion, an
increase of 3.7% as compared with $2.628 billion for the first quarter of fiscal
2005. Net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 on a GAAP basis was $123
million compared with a net loss of $133 million for the first quarter of
fiscal 2005.
"With the acquisitions of StorageTek and SeeBeyond this quarter,
revenue grew and customers are responding very positively," said Scott
McNealy, chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems. "We're seeing momentum, with
the doubling of price/performance for our UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based Sun
Fire servers, clearing the 3 million license mark with Solaris 10, a 55%
sequential increase in Sun Java Enterprise System subscribers, and our Opteron
processor-based Sun Fire server business growing units 109% and our midrange
storage arrays, led by the Sun StorEdge 6920, growing revenue 15% year over
year. We are confident in our product strategy, and as momentum behind our
execution builds, we are beginning to fire on all cylinders."
...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- in April
I commented on StorageTek's business performance in various segments. before the
Sun merger was announced. In the post merger situation it would be too
simplistic to expect that adding StorageTek's $2 billion annual revenue to
Sun's own $10 billion run rate will result in $12 billion revenue being
reported this time next year. That's not the way
mergers have worked in
the storage market. It wouldn't greatly surprise me, if the disruption and
acclimatization following the merger actually resulted in lower revenue in the
next few quarters compared to the sum of the two parts.
But as Sun
gets to know the storage business better, by leaning on StorageTek's expertise -
it can expect vastly
better results in this market than in the past. Some signs of this were already
evident, the day after Sun's earnings announcement, when I received the best
crafted storage
press
release I had ever seen from Sun (in 15 years of publishing) about a new
tape drive. It's a small
start - but it's the right direction. |
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IDC Reports on
Server Market
STORAGEsearch Discusses Pivotal Shift in Storage Market
Repainting
the Dawn of Sun's SPARC Market Legend
Sun's New 8 Way SPARC Chip
Curtiss-Wright
Debuts Dual-Channel Gigabit Ethernet PMC
Sun Reports Results
earlier news -
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Epoka Group,
with sales offices in
Germany, Denmark and Russia is a leading
European
reseller of Sun and Fujitsu SPARC
servers. |
 Sun
VARs Germany | |
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Has
Infiniband Established Itself in the Market? - article by Engenio
This
article looks at the state of the Infiniband market at the end of 2005.
After
5 years stirring in the emerging market cauldron the Infiniband market hasn't
turned out to be the popular flavor which was originally anticipated. But
it's finally starting to get served up in some important markets.
An
Infiniband port now costs half as much as a fibre-channel port and delivers
many times the performance rate. According to the author, Infiniband is now
ready to take its place on the mainstream technology menu. ...read the article ,
...Engenio profile,
InfiniBand | |
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Virtual
Tape: Can You Afford to Ignore It? - article by MaXXan Systems
Network
connected disk to disk backup systems for the enterprise have come a long way
since the first pioneering products started to appear in the pages of
STORAGEsearch.com in the late 1990s.
Some of the growing
sophistication in the market can be seen by the way that the marketing
terminology has morphed from the early D2d (let's kill tape backup), via D2D2T
(let's be friends with tape / peaceful coexistence) to the current VTL (Virtual
Tape Library - let's just see if they notice that it's more reliable and works
faster - and don't tell them that there isn't a tape in the box) type of
approaches.
But if you think that speed, reliability and cost are the
only things you need to know about the "virtual" versus "real"
tape library argument - take a look at this comprehensive article from MaXXan
Systems which shows there are a lot more benefits than that. ...read the article,
...MaXXan profile,
Disk to disk backup | |
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Serial Attached SCSI - Delivering Flexibility to the
Data Center - article by LSI Logic and Maxtor
If you think
you already know SAS because you know SATA and traditional SCSI then think
again. Sometimes disruptive technologies wear an unassuming disguise. In
fiction, Clark Kent, Frodo Baggins and Buffy Summers at first seem harmless, but
we see them change into Superman, the Ring Bearer and the Slayer.
SAS
too comes cloaked in plain garb - with a physical layer which looks a lot like
SATA. But like the Incredible Hulk there are muscles rippling under that shirt -
and you would be wrong to dismiss SAS so lightly. There's a lot more inside this
interface than it says on the box as this informative article reveals. ...read the article,
...LSI Logic profile,
...Maxtor profile,
Serial Attached SCSI | |
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