Linux data infrastructure servers to grow at 46% a year

With digital data traffic approximately doubling every year, demand for servers that manage and direct that traffic over telecom provider networks - Data Infrastructure Servers (DISs) - will grow geometrically as well, according to In-Stat/MDR. However, since voice traffic growth is nearly flat, voice-centric NEBS-Compliant Servers (NCSs), another segment of the teledatacom server market, will be similarly flat over the next several years, the high tech research firm says.While thanks to Moore's Law servers are becoming more capable every year, this doubling in performance every 18 months still lags behind the demand for data - by about 26% per year - and this difference is the main driver of shipment growth for DISs. Surprisingly, the highest growth sub-sector in the TDS market is the bladed NCS market. In fact, when you filter NCSs by form factor, non-bladed NCSs will actually decline in revenues at -16% on an annual rate while the bladed NCSs will surpass one bln dollars halfway through 2008. Similarly, when you polarize DISs by form factor, non-bladed DISs grow at a rate only slightly above overall server market expectations, even though they will top ten bln within the next 5 years. But, the blade portion of DISs will enjoy a 75% CAGR. While Sun has regained the top spot of the overall TDS and the NCS markets, HP is the market share leader of the DIS market. Also, even though UNIX will garner the largest share of revenues over the entire forecast period, Linux will enjoy a 46% CAGR.