The New Server Battlefield

These days, you can look at the server market in more than one way: From a pricing perspective, servers are clearly becoming commoditized, yet they still offer tremendous growth opportunities for solution providers.

Though the emphasis of servers has shifted to a consolidated infrastructure and price-performance, the server market has not hit the skids. The worldwide server market fell just shy of $50 billion last year, growing more than 7 percent, according to Gartner. Unit growth, however, was almost three times revenue growth--or nearly 21 percent. Despite falling prices, such growth provides the opportunity for services revenue, and up-selling storage and software.

Currently, three vendors have the most at stake: Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. The latest servers to hit the market show the battle is being fought over the ability to manage them. Dell's growth is outpacing the others', though HP and IBM account for a majority of all server revenue. Still, Dell's unit growth suggests that price points on industry-standard servers require rivals to do more than add a few bells and whistles.

HP has done just that with System Insight Manager, the administration tool developed by the former Compaq that provides a common administration interface with all of HP's servers, from entry-level ProLiants to high-end Superdomes. Additionally, HP has added storage to the mix. Last month, it rolled out Storage Essentials, which uses industry standards to allow an administrator to monitor server and storage resources.

HP gained this new capability through an OEM agreement with AppIQ. Administrators can use Insight Manager to launch Storage Essentials and manage storage arrays. Now, the two companies are working to build the Storage Essentials product as a native part of the HP Insight Manager, says Rich Escott, HP's director of storage management software. That release, due out later this year, will integrate the application logic of Storage Essentials into the common services of HP System Insight Manager. Administrators will have one single sign-on; role-based security; one common event subsystem that collects, correlates and routes all of the events from servers and storage; one common discovery system that finds the topology and discovers the relationships between servers, networks and storage; and one common database object repository, Escott says."We are already well into the joint development of this tighter integration," he says, adding that since both use J2EE and JBoss, the integration should be relatively simple.

This functionality will replace HP's OpenView Storage Area Manager, which will be phased out, though support will continue for three years, Escott says.

IBM is offering IBM Director, which manages all of the company's key server platforms, including xSeries, iSeries, pSeries and even some zSeries (mainframe) systems, says Rob Sauerwalt, IBM's global brand manager.

In addition, a new release of IBM Director (5.1), due out next quarter, will support the management of server and storage systems and is the most substantial effort under development in this space, according to Sauerwalt.

"This is probably the most significant feature set or code set that we are making," he says.

Power PlayBlade servers are no longer just for large enterprises. Hewlett-Packard's new line of blades--Blades for Business servers--specifically targets SMBs. Launched this month, the offerings include entry-level systems and allow use of the same rack for storage and networking devices.

HP's new blade enclosure can plug into a standard 110-volt outlet, rather than the usual 220-volt requirement. "For a customer who may not have a full data-center layout, that's a key simplification," says Vince Gayman, HP's director of worldwide SMB product programs.

IBM says 220 volts makes no difference. "My assumption is they're going to have to go to 220 anyway," says Tim Dougherty, director of blade center marketing. "These processors tend to get more powerful, and they consume more energy by definition."