Australia and New Zealand server market is expected to register flat growth in customer revenues due to falling prices, while growth will be registered in unit shipments with a compound annual growth rate of 5% through 2015, mainly driven by x86 growth, according to IDC.
The research firm said that despite interest in cloud computing models, a future where Australia and New Zealand organisations no longer buy servers is unlikely to come in the next five years.
IDC infrastructure senior analyst Trevor Clarke said on one hand the Australian server market remains robust and will continue to be so out to 2015, reflecting a positive sentiment across the ICT industry.
"However, on the other hand as a result of economic troubles and the impacts of natural disasters, New Zealand organisations will face a tougher 2011 than their peers across the ditch with spending on server platforms tempered. However, NZ spending on servers will also continue to grow until 2015," Clarke added.
IDC infrastructure associate director Matt Oostveen said virtualisation and multicore technologies will enable customers to migrate higher-end enterprise workloads from Unix and mainframes to x86 server platforms.
"This will result in the x86 segment growing faster than all other CPU types and make server systems based on this architecture the most popular across A/NZ" Oostveen said.
"However, the mainframe and Unix systems will continue to play a part in the market, albeit a less prominent one than in years past; but they are still the bastion of RAS computing in some of the biggest organisations in the region."
The research firm expects that there will be a shift to high density computing based on blade technology and increased interest in integrated infrastructure.
Further, linux will continue to take share away from the Windows OS in the next few years.
