INDUSTRY

For the third consecutive year, IMEX Research will present the industry keynote “Blade Servers: State-of-the-Industry 2005” at the upcoming Server Blade Summit being held in San Jose, California. According to IMEX Research, Blades are ushering in a paradigm shift for the server, storage and networking infrastructures in the IT industry. This shift will continue to be driven by the lure of volume economics inherent in the blades architecture, notwithstanding the still-evolving standardization at the hardware and interface levels for interoperability. Integration, consolidation, virtualization, and autonomic management will be the hallmarks of this paradigm shift. As open standards crystallize further at the physical and interface levels, vendors will start creating product differentiation at the middleware, data management, and vertical industry solutions levels. "Blade Servers will experience an explosive growth in the future, growing to 32% of all server shipments by 2008" said Anil Vasudeva, Principal Analyst & Founder of IMEX Research, a technology markets research and advisory company, based in San Jose, California. “As these factors are addressed, market revenues for blades would grow to over $9.2 billion in systems and $12.5 billion in IT systems and services by 2008, opening up major opportunities for semiconductor, boards, interconnect fabrics, systems, middleware and services vendors and for associated venture investments,” Vasudeva said further. Integrated blades-based solutions will become part of the core data center, accessible to all users, increasing efficiencies, and reducing total cost of ownership by as much as 45% in both IT Computing and IP Telecommunications infrastructures. "On the heels of a fast-developing Blade Servers ecosystem, initially promulgated by IBM and Intel through opening the BladeCenter specifications to all companies, Blade Servers are already experiencing high growth, surpassing all other servers in growth and have surpassed $1.3 billion in revenues in 2004", according to IMEX Research. The next generation Data Centers have started to take shape using Integrated Servers, Storage and Networking blades interconnected by a high speed fabric and acting as a Local Area Grid (LAG*) and will provide nodal connectivity for Wide Area Grids (WAG*) at the Campus, Metro, and Long Haul levels in the future. Following reports from IMEX Research address the emerging technologies, markets, competitors, and market opportunities in these areas: • Blade Servers Industry Report 2005 • IP Storage Industry Report 2005 • High Performance Computing 2005 • Next Generation Data Center Infrastructure For further complimentary resources on Blade Servers, including Blade Servers Insight Newsletter, Network Storage, High Availability Computing & Telecom, High Performance Computing, and Next Generation Data Center Infrastructures, go to http://www.imexresearch.com and http://www.imexresearch.com/newsletters/jan05a.html