Observations on each market segment from Technavio are as follows.
“Rack servers are traditional data center servers, which account for a majority 63 percent of the overall market revenue generation,” says Abhishek Sharma, one of the lead analysts at Technavio for data center research. “Rack servers contribute significantly toward the growth of the data center server market through continuous innovations by vendors and component manufacturers. Most of the enterprise data centers currently in operation opt for rack servers, which brings in a significant amount of revenue to the market. The adoption of these servers will continue to increase because of the enterprise preference and expertise in operating these servers, pushed by continuous innovations in compute power and energy efficiency by vendors.”
“Blade servers are extremely compact and designed to be installed with chassis,” notes the report’s executive summary. “The support infrastructure required for blade servers are supplied by the chassis, and their performance is comparable to that of rack servers. The blade servers have relatively simple cabling, have better load balancing, and are very efficient through integrated Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, thus driving for their increasing adoption. Additionally, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to co-locate racks will mainly opt for this type of server.”
“Tower servers are mainly used in the standalone form, and provide cooling and scalability provisions. They have fairly complex cabling and are mainly compatible with high-end servers,” adds Sharma. “SMEs are the main end-users of these towers. Many tier 1 and tier 2 data centers from underdeveloped countries are also adopting these servers as they are available at affordable price points.”
