The capabilities of servers have recently increased significantly as new form factors have emerged to support workload-optimised systems, integrated systems and cloud computing systems, says Ronaldo De Santana, research analyst, systems and infrastructure solutions, at IDC.
“The newest introduction to the server market is the hyper-scale server.”
Hyper-scale servers, says De Santana, are systems that are designed for large scale-out data centre environments where parallelised workloads are prevalent. This new form factor serves the unique needs of these data centres with a streamlined system design that focuses on improving performance, energy efficiency and density.
“Hyper-scale servers are typically deployed in fully assembled rack configurations based on low-power processors and dense form factors that fit well into cloud computing, high-performance computing (HPC) and mega data centre configurations,” he explains.
“There are challenges to defining these servers based on system design and architecture, as the technology is new and still evolving, yet differentiations do exist: blades are primarily targeted at traditional enterprise data centres that need to support standard enterprise software (eg virtualisation, mail, business apps), whereas blades reside in environments that run complex applications for a small set of users. Hyper-scale workloads are typically tech-orientated, designed for HPC and Web hosting. Hyper-scale servers reside in environments that run relatively simple applications for a very large set of users.”
De Santana adds that hyper-scale servers were only introduced to the MEA market in 2010. “According to IDC's server tracker in 2010, spending on hyper-scale servers in MEA represented a 0.3% share of the total server market. This market experienced a year-on-year growth of 134% in 2011, a growth that outpaced the growth rates of all the other form factors (racks, blades and towers) combined.
“SA has seen a healthy uptake of hyper-scale servers, when compared with other countries in MEA, experiencing an 83% year-on-year growth in spend. SA could see a major influx of hyper-scale servers from quarter two of 2012 if the country is awarded the bid to implement the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) telescope, the world's most powerful radio telescope, since high-performance telescopes require servers capable of HPC.”
IDC predicts that hyper-scale servers will continue to see increased utilisation by Web data centres and large scale-out data centres in future, and that they will continue to have higher annual growth rates than rack, blades and towers combined, notes De Santana. With drive mainly coming from the Middle East, IDC forecasts that spending on hyper-scale servers in MEA will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 44.1% to 2015, he concludes.
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