Firms warned of server market growth problems

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There will be a significant rise in server sales over the next two years, causing problems with data centre power, cooling and space.

So claims analyst firm Gartner, which has advised businesses to take action imminently and calculate the impact of any new deployments.

This is despite the global server market declining by 16.5 per cent and 16.8 per cent in revenue and volume respectively in 2009. Gartner said the segment will recover from this year onwards to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 5.5 per cent for shipments and 2.4 per cent for revenue from 2010 through 2014.

Earlier this year, both Gartner and IDC reported growth in the worldwide server shipments in the fourth quarter of 2009.

“While server sales expected to rise the next two years, many IT administrators are already grappling with data centre power, cooling and space issues of its current fleet,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

Kumar added: “Virtualisation and consolidation projects will help offset some of these issues, but with the snowball effect that these issues tend to create within an organisation, users need to act quickly.”

Businesses should seek to use energy-monitoring tools to predict capacity requirements and keep an eye on costs, the analyst organisation recommended.

Gartner also recommended accelerating consolidation and virtualisation projects to provide additional energy capacity and floor space. It explained that the benefits tend to increase towards the end of such initiatives, hence the need to hasten their completion.

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