Intel may struggle to recover server market

JP Morgan Securities analyst Christopher Danely maintained a "neutral" rating on Intel, saying he expects downside during the first half of 2006, reports UK Web site Computing.

Danely noted that, according to Mercury Research, Intel`s market share fell to 81% in the third quarter, down from 82% in the second quarter "due to continued competitive pressure" from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

"Intel lost one point of market share in both the desktop and notebook segments, while losing two points of market share in the server segment," he said.

"While we have been concerned on share loss in desktop and servers, the notebook share loss is the first sequential decline in share for the segment at Intel in over 1.5 years," Computing quotes Danely as saying.

Intel`s cancellation of the Whitefield processor "was the most significant negative product announcement since it was targeted at the lucrative four-way and up (four or more processors per system) server end market," Danely said.

With the cancellation "it could be difficult for Intel to recover its lost server market share until well into 2007," Danely added.

Computing also reported on October`s VMworld show, in Las Vegas, which produced a number of new virtualisation products to cut the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure, while improving security and easing administration.

IBM announced a partnership with VMware and Citrix to consolidate desktop PCs into virtual machines running on its xSeries or BladeCenter servers.

Companies deploying the Virtualised Hosted Client Infrastructure (VHCI) system, in place of standalone Windows PCs, could see total cost savings of up to 60%, according to IBM.

VHCI uses VMware tools to create and manage virtual Windows XP systems that are accessed via Citrix Presentation Server. The vendor will pilot implementations early in 2006.

Following the slew of new Ubuntu versions released under the Breezy Badger 5.10 banner recently, the Ubuntu team has finalised the server version of the operating system, Ubuntu 5.10 Server, Tectonic reports.

While previous Ubuntu versions could be installed and used as servers, Ubuntu never featured strongly in this space, even though it is the traditionally strong sector for Linux, says the article.

Weighing in at only 400MB with the default installation, the Ubuntu team has obviously given a lot of thought about what one really does and doesn`t need on a server, Tectonic says.

Server applications include Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Zope, OpenLDAP, Bind and Samba.