Back at the farm: Servers growing up

Over the past six months more IT professionals have sought information on hardware solutions than any other technology area (networking is a very close 2nd). Data from BT Trax reveals a curiosity; storage resources were accessed more frequently than information about servers—34% compared to 25%.  Historically, servers and storage have been fairly equal in activity levels, each claiming about 1/3 of all the hardware resources downloaded from the ZDNet White Paper Directory.

So, what's happening with servers that the level of activity has fallen roughly 25% from the same 6-month period one year ago? It appears that interest has shifted to computing platforms, server performance management, and getting servers to do specific things--such as content management, manage and deliver email, and serve Web pages. This shift has siphoned off a good portion of the activity in the pure server hardware category. With the push to consolidate IT infrastructure over the past year (the #1 server topic one year ago was server consolidation), IT staffs are now focusing on pushing server performance, flexibility, and functionality to the next level.