In a recent post that highlighted the demise of the midrange server market, Timothy Prickett Morgan talked about the new server classification that IDC has just started tracking, “Density-optimized”:
These are minimalist server designs that resemble blades in that they have skinny form factors but they take out all the extra stuff that hyperscale Web companies like Google and Amazon don’t want in their infrastructure machines because they have resiliency and scale built into their software stack and have redundant hardware and data throughout their clusters….These density-optimized machines usually put four server nodes in a 2U rack chassis or sometimes up to a dozen nodes in a 4U chassis and have processors, memory, a few disks, and some network ports and nothing else per node.
Source: IDC -- Q3 2011 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker
Here are the stats that Prickett Morgan calls out (I particularly like the last bullet 
:
- By IDC’s reckoning these dense servers accounted for $458 million in sales, up 33.8 percent in a global server market that fell by 7.2 percent to $14.2 billion in the quarter.
- Density optimized machines accounted for 132,876 servers in the quarter, exploding 51.5 percent, against the overall market, which comprised 2.2 million shipments and rose 2 percent.
- Dell, by the way, owns this segment, with 45.2 percent of the revenue share, followed up by Hewlett-Packard with 15.5 percent of that density-optimized server pie.
Extra-credit reading
- See the IDC press release.
- Read the Dell press release.
Pau for now…
