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Unix
server sales have been down globally, and India is no exception.
According to analysts, the Indian Unix server market stood
at $175 million in 2000. Experts estimate that the Unix server
market in India stood between $115 to $120 million in 2001-02.
“Software development houses that push the mid-range
server market did not get enough new projects to get going
and we have seen a drop by 18 percent. Sales in SME and the
manufacturing segment that influence the low-end server market
dropped by 35 percent. The other factor inhibiting growth
was the consolidation of ISPs and data centres,” says
Kamal Dutta, country business manager, Unix Server & Solutions,
Hewlett-Packard India.
Sun: Leader of the pack
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Raman
says HP’s innovations in the Intel space has seen it firmly
entrenched in the financial sector |
Sun
Microsystems has traditionally dominated this space and it
continues to do so. The company claims a 35 to 40 percent
share of the Unix server market in India.
Strengths: Sun has traditionally done a remarkable
job of communicating its unified architecture of Solaris-Sparc.
This combination has offered customers a truly scalable platform
going from one to 106 CPUs without having to rewrite applications
to take advantage of the greater power.
Sun’s enterprise offerings include the 2800 and 880 servers
based on the Ultra Sparc III. The 880 with 8 processors, hot
plug memory and CPU starts at Rs 10 lakh.
Sun’s top of the line model is the Sun Fire 15000 with
72 to 106 CPUs, costing anything between $1 million and $15
million. Two of them have already been installed in the two
weeks since its India launch.
 The
company has a strong distribution set up. This year Sun appointed
HCL as a distributor. The alliance is expected to take Sun
to smaller cities such as Jaipur and Lucknow. “HCL has
a reach in government and PSUs that will complement our existing
distribution set up,” says K P Unnikrishnan, country
head-marketing, Sun Microsystems India.
Weaknesses: Sun’s biggest strength, its unified
architecture, is also in many ways its Achilles heel. Sun
is the only major without a strong second or third line of
servers. This is particularly notable in the entry-level or
SME space where the company acquired Cobalt to make up for
this inadequacy. Of late, there have been signs that Sun is
finally waking up to the fact that it has to embrace Linux,
at least at the low-end, in order to beat back Dell and the
rest of the Wintel crowd.
Opportunities: If Sun executes McNealy’s announcements
of coming out with its own Linux distribution and a series
of low-end x86 servers running Linux, it could give the Wintel
crowd a run for their money.
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UNNIkrishnan
says HCL’s reach in the government sector will further
push up Sun’s dominance in the Unix space |
Threats:
Wintel servers are getting more powerful and Intel’s
Xeon roadmap is finally getting it into the enterprise. With
commodity Intel servers coming on strong, Sun India will need
to emulate its parent in the US, and aggressively market Cobalt
and other low end servers running Linux. Abroad, Sun just
announced a program to migrate folks using Intel-based servers
running Windows NT to its Linux-based Cobalt RaQ or Qube server
appliances. The company sold 100,000 Cobalt servers last year.
Sun India doesn’t seem to be pushing Cobalt very hard
but they will have to if they are to counter Wintel at the
low end.
IBM: The phoenix rises
Strengths: IBM has seen a strong resurgence in its
Unix server line, the pSeries. “Our biggest area was
the pSeries,” says Ganesh. According to Gartner, “the
decline of zSeries and iSeries revenue will continue; however,
IBM’s aggressive focus on Unix is paying off, and starting
in 2001, pSeries gains will more than make up for the decline
in the other two server systems.”
IBM has been very aggressive in the Unix market with its pSeries.
“You can cluster up to 640 CPUs and run a thousand instances
of Linux on the pSeries,” says Ganesh.
Weaknesses: 2001-02 saw a slowdown in the mainframe
business due to the software downturn. IBM has moved to introduce
a new low cost entry-level mainframe called the Raptor. With
this model, the cost-of-entry into zSeries has dropped from
$750,000 to about $250,000. This combined with Linux on Raptor
could squeeze high end Unix boxes from rivals.
Opportunities: Server consolidation is the trend cited
by IBM. No one is better placed than Big Blue with its three
mid to high-end server lines—the pSeries (Unix), iSeries
(AS/400) and zSeries (mainframes).
Threats: Sun has raised the performance bar with its
Sun Fire 15000 and is moving its servers into the kind of
performance traditionally only available on IBM mainframes.
IBM has countered with Regatta, and more recently Raptor.
HP: The comeback kid
 Internal
sources at IDC list HP with a 23 percent market share in Q4
2001. “We have increased our market share 3 percent over
last year,” says Kamal.
Strengths: HP has a strong line of Unix servers topping
out at the Superdome that sells for half a million to a million
US dollars. The company will move to Itanium over time but
for now it continues to sell PA-RISC machines. HP believes
that Itanium will ramp up in 2002-03, so for now it is concentrating
on its PA-RISC boxes. HP has a very strong channel presence
with 40 percent of its Unix servers going through this high
margin route. It plans to increase that to 50 percent.
In technology, HP has come out with a range of blade servers
running Linux, with HP-UX and Windows NT blades coming in
H1 2002.
Weaknesses: Despite having a good line up of servers,
HP has never focused on a market niche the way Compaq has
on Intel or Sun on Unix. This has prevented the company from
being the leader in either segment.
Opportunities: HP’s fortunes in the high-end space
are closely linked to Itanium in the long run. If that chip
takes off, the sky is the limit for HP, which has shown a
greater focus on Itanium than any other vendor.
Threats: Phasing out a successful line of processors
can be tricky. Customers will be confused by the move to Itanium,
though HP is doing its best to smoothen the transition.
Compaq: Alpha and Himalaya, the one-two punch
Strengths: In the Unix space Compaq is second to Sun
with 25 percent. Compaq’s acquisition of Digital gave
it the Alpha line of Unix servers. Its Tandem buy got it Himalaya.
Both these lines have continued to do well with wins such
as the company’s implementation of an ATM network for
Punjab National Bank using the NonStop Himalaya Server to
offer ATM banking and other online banking facilities. Similarly,
the Alpha range was used to provide a disaster recovery solution
to Global Trust Bank (GTB) at GTB’s disaster recovery
site in Mumbai. Compaq’s high-end servers have done well
in telecom, banking and finance, manufacturing and high performance
transaction computing.
Weaknesses: Alpha is a great platform but with Compaq
moving to Itanium, Alpha’s days are numbered. Compaq,
as with HP, finds itself having to convince customers that
they should move to IA-64.
Opportunities: A lot depends upon how the merger goes.
If things work out, the new entity should hold the trumps
in the Unix space with a combined share of close to 50 percent.
Threats: The competition won sit still while Compaq
(or the merged HP-Compaq entity) migrates its customers to
IA-64. Both IBM and Sun have strong 64-bit lines that have
been around for donkey’s years and have proved themselves
in the real world. They will move in for the kill.
And in the end
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HP’s
Dutta says they are expecting a big market for
blade servers in India |
With
IDC predicting a growth of 8 percent for 2002-03, the server
market can only go up. That said, it looks like being a gradual
recovery. It’s always difficult to gaze into the crystal
ball and predict the future but its safe to say that the Intel
market has a good chance of beating the RISC market in revenues
in the coming year. Itanium will most probably be a no-show
in 2002-03 too. Xeon will continue to do well. Hammer is a
question mark. It could see AMD entering the server segment
in a significant manner for the first time.
In the high-end space, Sun, IBM, HP and Compaq will continue
to duke it out. If everything goes as planned by Carly Fiorina,
the combine of HP and Compaq could give Big Blue and Sun a
run for their money, possibly even overtake both as the top
server vendor in both the Intel and Unix segment. All in all,
it’s going to be an interesting year for the server market.
The year that was has laid the ground for server consolidation
with blades taking rack density to new heights. Now, it remains
to be seen if corporates will go in for centralised set ups
with hundreds of rack servers consolidating their existing
hardware or if they will prefer to go in for Raptors, Sun
Fires and the like.
India
Inc shies away from Linux on the server
IDC
data reveals that 42 per cent of Linux systems are running
as Web servers and 24 per cent as Web infrastructure platforms.
Only about 10 per cent of Linux systems are running enterprise
class applications such as commercial databases. In reality,
Linux has seen many takers in the Indian ISP and ASP markets,
especially in the B and C category ISPs. The reason being
flexibility, scalability and low cost of maintenance.
Today, most Indian enterprises are using Linux as an add on
to the existing platforms. Although companies like Oracle
and IBM expect an increase in corporate interest for Linux
deployment, it is still being used as a departmental and file
or print server rather than as a mission critical database
server.
Globally, Linux market share is growing at a steady pace.
IDC states in its Server Operating Environments Market Forecast
and Analysis, 2000-2004 that “Linux remains the fastest-growing
server operating system, with the worldwide installed base
of Linux growing at a 35 percent compounded annual growth
rate (CAGR) between 1999-2004. Linux has 27 percent market
share in 2000, up from 25 percent the previous year.”
A new Merrill Lynch survey of 50 US and 15 European CIOs reports
that some 50 percent of those surveyed see Linux “as
a threat” to Solaris and 38 percent regard Linux as a
threat to Windows NT in the next three years. IDC Research
reveals a 45-80 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
for Linux on the Intel architecture over RISC/Unix environments.
Customer interest in Linux is primarily driven by its ability
to slash costs through the consolidation of Solaris and NT
workloads (particularly Web serving, file and print and messaging)
onto Linux servers.
“Migration
to Linux is happening in three areas,” says Sachin Dabir,
head-enterprise sales, Red Hat India. “Linux is being
used as a database server; secondly it is popular as a mail
or proxy server and lastly is used for file and print services
and as a desktop.” Red Hat is the largest open source
company in the world with a market share of 65 percent of
all worldwide Linux server software, and the last one year
has seen the company establish a presence in India.
The Indian government is a major user of Linux too. NIC uses
Red Hat Linux. Other users include Breach Candy hospital,
Hughes Escorts, Siemens and Philips’ R&D centres
in Bangalore. We have 70 to 80 large customers in India.
Red Hat has officially shipped over 2,000 copies of RHL in
India. Dabir estimates that these would have been used to
install RHL on over 15,000 servers since there is no restriction
on how many machines a copy of Linux can be installed upon.
On an average, one copy ends up on at least five to ten servers.
Education is a hot segment for Linux on the server. “We
have a lot of enquiries at the state level,” says Dabir.
He added that tenders are starting to include Linux. In some
cases they specify only Linux or Unix.
Red Hat India is also looking at partnering with Indian Institutes
of Technology (IITs). The tie up with IITs will be for working
with IIT students and helping them to develop proficiency
in various Linux applications and technologies. Red Hat India
will also work closely with various Indian software developers
working on Linux to provide them necessary technology hand-holding.
The Indian market presents an interesting picture for Red
Hat Linux. While in the US Linux commands close to a significant
market share on the server side, the Indian enterprise segment
still seems apprehensive about using Linux. One reason could
be the lack of organised support till very recently, a crucial
factor for enterprises. Another bottleneck is the stronghold
of NetWare and Windows NT/2000 in the Indian server market.
If Red Hat has to make a dent into the market share of Novell
and Microsoft, it will have to gain mind share first.
The
blades are here
A
relatively new technology has emerged in the server arena.
Blade servers let you pack 280 servers on a single rack. These
are comprehensive servers that include processor, memory,
network connections, and associated electronics, all on a
single motherboard called a blade. This technology addresses
the current trend among large computing centres to reduce
space requirement, power, maintenance and reliability, while
lowering their total cost of ownership. Enterprises can also
expect a higher return on their IT investments. “We are
expecting a big market for these products in India,”
says Kamal Dutta, country business manager, Unix Server &
Solutions, HP India.
Gartner Dataquest forecasts worldwide blade server shipments
will increase dramatically, growing from the 84,810 units
it expects will ship in 2002, to more than 1 million in 2006.
It also anticipates that revenue from blades will reach at
least $1.2 billion during this time.
The server blade, along with storage, networking and other
blades, are typically installed in a rack-mountable enclosure
that houses multiple blades and common resources such as cabling,
power supplies, and cooling fans, which leads to big savings.
With its modular, hot-pluggable architecture, the easily accessible
blade server offers increased computing density, while ensuring
both maximum scalability and ease of management.
With major hardware vendors now jumping on the server blade
bandwagon, blades could mean big business. Hewlett-Packard
was the first vendor to offer this product. Recently, the
company announced OpenBlade, an open specification for blade
servers designed to drive the development of standards-based
blade server architectures and in turn provide enterprises
with interoperable, multi-vendor blade server solutions.
HP’s blade server products will initially run on the
Linux operating system distributions of Red Hat, Debian and
SuSE. Because Linux is very lightweight, has lower memory
requirements and makes better use of CPU power, it is an ideal
operating system for blade servers, which require flexibility
and scalability in highly constrained environments due to
heat restrictions. HP-UX and Microsoft Windows are expected
to be available on blade servers in the first half of 2002.
The HP blade server chassis, server blade, storage blade,
network blade and management blade are currently available.
Pricing starts at $1,925 for a single server blade, or $7,525
for an HP blade server chassis with one management blade.
Blade servers are best suited for ISPs, IDCs and enterprises.
Joining the bandwagon is Compaq India which recently announced
the availability of Compaq ProLiant BL e-Class Server in India.
The server blade architecture is designed for the enterprise
and will enable customers to pack 280 servers into a standard
42U rack. These blade servers will address the needs of space-constrained
enterprises and service providers for increased server density,
rapid deployment and provisioning, and remote manageability.
“The
blade server is optimised to provide flexibility to increase
the number of servers without compromising on performance
or being constrained by space, operating in a multi-tier environment.
This enables the enterprise to quickly respond to changing
business needs through dynamic resource scaling and virtual
presence and control,” says Pallab Talukdar, director,
Enterprise Products, Enterprise Business Group, Compaq India.
ProLiant BL10e is based on Intel Pentium III 700 MHz processor
architecture. Customers can deploy twenty blade servers in
a 3U enclosure, enabling up to 280 blades in a 42U rack. Compaq’s
blade servers are available for shipment and is has priced
at Rs 2 lakh plus taxes, and the enclosure at Rs 5 lakh plus
taxes, and works both on Windows 2000 and Linux.
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