IDC said the blade-server market is a key growth category, with sales expected to hit $9 billion by 2008--and that is from a near-standing start in 2000. Melenovsky suggested that the advantages of blade servers are changing, as the initial benefit was largely value; today server advantages are marked not just by value proposition, but also by tools and secondary advantages, like ease-of-deployment and ease-of-management. He noted one Linux-based server application that is taking off: clustering configurations to carry out high-performance computational tasks.
Steve Josselyn, another IDC analyst specializing in the server market, reported that a "good environment" for hardware and software replacement is helping to produce new enterprise spending for IT infrastructure, as users migrate to more robust systems. The major suppliers are IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems.
IDC expects the U.S. to hold on to its dominant share of the worldwide market, followed by Western Europe and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). The market-research firm anticipates the strongest growth--about 6.5 percent--will come from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from the Asia/Pacific region.
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