The Cloud Computing movement is thought to lead to huge growth in server sales over the next few years.
According to IT analyst IDC sales will surge to $9.4 billion over the next four years.
By 2015 it has been estimated that 1.2 million systems will be deployed, underpinning Public Cloud deployments.
That is a compound annual growth rate of 21%. Furthermore there will be 570,000 servers which will be sold for Private Cloud implementations presenting an annual growth rate of 22%.
“As a result, Public Cloud Computing is a unit story with lower average selling value,” according to IDC analyst Katie Broderick.
Market analysis reveals that Public Clouds are constructed on “simpler server hardware.” Reliability, availability and serviceability are often integrated into the software layer i.e. failover and virtualisation.
Although most of the talk recently has been on Public Clouds many organisations are beginning to role out their own Private Cloud infrastructures. The majority of businesses invest in more robust hardware for their Private Cloud infrastructure choosing advanced CPUs, lots of memory and optimizing for high bandwidth usage.
This however poses many issues regarding security. The very essence of Private Clouds means that people roam around freely with business data on their mobile devices. There is little point in spending huge amounts of cash on network security only to allow essential business data to roam freely.
“Cloud Computing can dramatically simplify administrating and managing many companies’ datacentres and position IT as a service organization for the rest of the company” according to Broderick.
“Moving some of the more mundane tasks to the Cloud and freeing up manpower to focus on adding value to the business value to the business is critical to driving cloud adoption.” However companies must be extremely careful to choose the right vendor in order to manage and deploy the environment.
