New applications fuel server sales

摘要

Despite a trend toward system consolidation, which would imply a flattening in server sales, the server market demand has been strong. The top 3 server vendors - IBM, Hewlett Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. - increased their server revenues on average by 20%, with Compaq showing the strongest growth at 22.3%. The reason for the paradox is that, even though IT managers desperately want to consolidate their servers, new applications are creating unprecedented demand for more processing power and for storage farms that are pushing into terabyte territory. Applications driving the need for speed have primarily been in 2 categories: data warehousing and the Internet.