Server technology trends, vendor performance & spending data

The following presentation was given at Data Center Decision Spring 2005 in New York City.

Every six months, TheInfoPro (TIP) performs a study of the server markets by conducting in-depth interviews, average length one hour, with IT professionals from the likes of Citigroup, BellSouth, Reed Elsevier, Visa, Pfizer, Boeing and JPMorgan Chase.

This session presented by Bob Gill, managing director of TheInfoPro, Inc. focuses on:

• Ratings on how vendors are performing on 13 dimensions including: Technical innovation, sales quality, competitive positioning, delivery as promised and ease of doing business.
  
• Spending Data - how much is being spent with the vendors, and what is the trend, more, less or the same. How much should a server cost?
  
• Attitude and expectations: What is the future of server virtualization? Will blade servers take hold, or stall in the face of server virtualization? Which blade implementations are meeting user expectations? Will the platform of AMD and Linux spell defeat for Microsoft and Intel?
  
• Server Sectors:: Standalone servers, midrange systems, blade servers, server operating systems, server networking options, server storage options, system management tools, operating systems, and application suites.
  
• Dozens of vendors are rated including: Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, Egenera, EMC VMWare, Microsoft, Red Hat, Suse, Oracle, RLX, Cisco, Brocade, F5 Networks, McData, NetApp, Brocade, and 3Com.
  
• Future technology adoption or avoidance. TIP asks server professionals to discuss their usage, planned adoption or avoidance of over 30 different pieces of server hardware, software, and management tools ranging from standalone x86 servers, to AMD and RISC Blade Servers, to 8-way mid-range platforms, server networking & storage management technologies, virtualization and clustering software, and management tools. Which vendors are appearing on the short list to deliver?

View the presentation.