http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn052907-story01.html

Last week, the box counters at IDC and Gartner provided their quarterly estimates of global server sales by server type, operating system, and vendor. But IDC also went the extra mile and provided some insight into server sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In what must seem like something of a dream for server makers, Europe is going strong right now.

According to IDC, sales of server across all architectures rose by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2007 to nearly $4.3 billion, and the number of server units sold increased by 8 percent to 600,000 machines. In recent years, shipment growth has outpaced revenue growth, but the advent of multicore machines and sophisticated virtualization technologies are convincing some customers to buy beefier machines and then virtualize them. By going virtual, they can triple or even quadruple the utilization of the processors inside a server, but it takes a beefier server to do the trick because virtualization requires memory and I/O bandwidth and in some cases requires newer processors that have hardware features that help make virtualization hypervisors run better.

I wonder if this is not just Europe, but those countries like Serbia which are growing rapidly, getting investment and needing infrastructure roads, telecoms and everything that the consumers in the UK and Europe have, my friends were in Prague a few weeks ago and mentioned that everywhere had free wireless and couldn’t understand why you had to pay for it in the UK.

IDC says that in Western Europe in particular, virtualization is becoming normal and is one of the largest drivers of server sales in the short term.

A lot of the banks have already or are starting to look at virtualization in the city of London already, and in doing so they’re refreshing the server estates to servers or blades that can be used with virtualization, the concept being that as we upgrade to windows 2003, we virtualize and consolidate, decommissioning the hardware, from an organizational process element it can be a tricky but rewarding exercise, and as part of this we need boxes to virtualize on to, and as we move to SAN storage, these boxes become cpu engines, the head part of the system, but no longer the component part, the engine, fine an instrumental part of the car, but replaceable…