In a piece on Channel Insider, Steve Dallman, Channel Chief at Intel, says he and the company’s channel partners are seeing incredible growth in the server market, despite – and even thanks to – the increasing use of virtualization technology which should help reduce the number of servers.
“You would think with virtualization that you’d see fewer servers, but that’s not happening. The need for servers and server capacity is phenomenally large,” especially from the SMB (small and midsize business) market, Dallman said. “SMBs just don’t need to consolidate server farms,” he added.
Research firm Access Markets International said in January that global SMB server spending will reach $19.8 billion in 2008, a double-digit growth over 2007. While growth in the server space is still accelerating, Dallman said without virtualization, the growth in the space might be out of control.
“All virtualization is going to do is to moderate the growth in the server space to a level that’s manageable for both vendors and partners”, he said.
[Source: Channel Insider]