According to Martin Hingley, senior analyst at IDC, NT clusters will not feature in the high-end server market before the turn of the century. And contrary to industry speculation that IBM’s revenues from its high-end S/390 family were on the wain, IDC forcasts it will snare 85% of high-end server revenue for 1997, which it estimates to be about $2.8bn. Unix is expected to account for only 8% ($265) of total server revenues for the year, while other mainframes trail behind, to acccount for about 7% ($227m), but by the end of the decade, this market will have all but died out. However, IDC’s latest forecasts indicate S/390 revenues will remain flat during the next four years, while Unix will grow significantly from below. And HP is leading the charge, breaking down the integrated vertical market with the need for new applications such as decision support and on-line transaction processing, which are well addressed by the new cluster architectures, said Hingley.
