Report Date: January 2011 This Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers focuses on a market that is growing in complexity and sophistication, due to the emergence of related form factors, such as skinless servers, and the fast-growing interest in cloud computing, virtual input/output and fabrics. Blades represent an important stage in the evolution of servers as separate, discrete platforms give way to modular designs, and the boundaries between servers, storage and networking become increasingly blurred. This creates an increasing overlap of functionality between product categories that were previously more clearly delineated. These boundaries will be further tested as fabric-based computing becomes more prevalent, and all blade servers are examples of a fabric-enabled architecture, due to the switch-based backplane or midplane that they exploit. Blades represent a more proprietary investment, due to the lack of hardware form factor interoperability standards and the growing dependence on proprietary management tools and virtual input/output (I/O) solutions.
Mentions: HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu, Oracle, NEC, Bull, SGI, Hitachi
Free Download of Full Report
Topics: Market Research, Competitive Intelligence, Competitive Strategy, Market Intelligence