Indian Enterprise Blade Server Market Growing At 80-90%

In an effort to better its hold over the server market, HP recently expanded its BladeSystem portfolio with an integrity blade - Integrity BL870c, designed to handle memory-intensive data centre workloads while helping businesses lower cost, save energy and space, and decrease deployment time. Biztech 2.0 caught up with Rajesh Dhar, Country Manager, Industry Standard Servers, Technology Solutions Group, HP India, to understand the Indian market for blade servers – how big is it, challenges enterprises are facing and the growth possibilities for HP in the Indian blade server market.

How important is the Indian market for you?

India is the third largest market for us. As per IDC data, the total server growth has been to the tune of 20,000 units. The India market has grown leaps and bounds in the last year alone from an overall unit shipment size of 1,06,000 in CY06 to 1, 26,000 in CY07 and HP’s share of shipments is in the lead at 34%.

The overall server market is growing at a rate of 15-20%, within that blade server market is registering a growth of 80-90% per year especially at enterprise level.

Blade servers as a category grew about 100% from 6000 units in CY06 to 12000 in CY07. Even here HP has recorded a 65% market share in unit terms.

Who is your primary target audience and what are you doing for them?

About 70% of our solutions cater to the BFSI and telecom sector. Other than that we also cater to the manufacturing and garment sectors. Garment as a sector is in its first phase of computer adoption and is catching up fast. Today this sector is more on a distributed computing mode; as the sector consolidates its IT implementation, there will be the need for blade servers.

On the other hand, BFSI and telecom are in their third wave of IT implementation wherein IT investments are made for creating value added services for customers, dollars being spend on technology applications to create revenue generating services. Most of these applications are industry standard and run on both Windows and Linux. Banks for instance, are through with the first phase – core banking solution, and second phase – centralisation of their computer systems. Now they are expanding their branch networks to provide value added services through IT. The telecom sector is investing heavily into ring tone services, though ring tones aren’t its core business, it is a value added service that can generate revenue.

Both these sectors therefore, have huge data centres along with daunting manageability issues – both of which are contributing to the growth of blade server usage.

What are the challenges faced by the BFSI and telecom sector?

The rapid number of data centres springing up in the BFSI and telecom sector is giving rise to a number of concerns. For one, it is with regard to the huge space requirement for servers and the cost tied with it, in comparison to which blades give better space density. Added to this is the power cost and availability. Blade servers can provide around 25-35% thermal efficiency and reduce power consumption – thereby cut down on power cost and increase power availability – considerably, compared to rack servers.

People cost and availability to maintain data centres is a huge challenge faced by players in these sectors. While for software companies, it is easy to get considerably good engineers for their data centres, for telecom and BFSI technology, it is not the core business. Therefore, it is a huge challenge to hire and retain skills for managing data centres. Given this, the productivity ratio of a blade server vis-à-vis an engineer is 200 blade: 1 engineer compared to 20 rack servers: 1 engineer. A typical C-7000 blade server box with 10 units and 17 inches can handle 16 servers and is targeted towards enterprises with 30-40 server requirements.

How are you addressing the SMB market?

A C-3000 box is targeted towards small and medium businesses. This has 6 units, can handle 8 servers, and comes as an industry standard open platform solution being able to run on Windows and Linux platform. The functionality of this has been chalked out keeping in mind the size of an SMB.

Though SMBs are fast getting globally integrated, the size of the business is not very big. Take for instance, a chain of hospital with 80-100 branches across India. Typically, their IT need would range from 3 to 4 servers, a backup mechanism, a hospital management system software with remote management ability. A blade server addresses all of these. All that they have to do is just switch on the solution. That is why a typical SMB can run with one C-3000 blade server, thereby saving price and space. I feel blades are not servers but data centres for SMBs.