IDC: Virtual Server Market to Top $15B

Recent IDC research indicates that spending on virtualization will rocket to
nearly $15 billion worldwide by 2009.

To cut costs by consolidating servers, customers are partitioning smaller
two- and four-way x86 volume servers with special software that helps carve
up space on a server to run multiple operating systems, or applications.

“Virtualization is a follow on to a lot of the consolidation activities
we’ve been seeing over the last four or five years,” said Matt Eastwood, vice president of IDC’s server research.

“The virtualization aspect of consolidation becomes more strategic because
you can have a real impact on your infrastructure in terms of how many
systems you have. You can really take out costs associated with management
of systems if you do it correctly.”

He said dual- and multi-core processors and 64-bit computing for Windows and
Linux are gaining popularity, noting that existing offerings for
Intel-based platforms are perceived as “proven,” and will drive wider
acceptance.

IDC also found that:

• Moore than three-quarters of all companies with 500+ employees are
  deploying virtual servers
• Survey respondents using server virtualization technologies said they
  expect 45 percent of the new servers purchased next year will be
  virtualized
• More than 50 percent of all virtual servers are running production-level
  applications, including the most business-critical workloads
• There is significant opportunity to optimize virtual server performance
  based on the types of server workloads
• S390, OS400 and Unix systems account for the bulk of customer spending
  on virtualized servers today, but rapid growth is occurring on Windows and
  Linux servers.

IDC’s research comes as software vendors are scrambling to find fair licensing schemes.