The global data center server market size is projected to reach $56 billion, growing at a CAGR of close to 5 percent during 2017-2021, Technavio said.
A breakdown of the report showed that Rack servers are traditional data center servers, which account for a majority 63 percent of the overall market revenue generation.
Rack servers contribute significantly toward the growth of the data center server market through continuous innovations by vendors and component manufacturers.
Blade servers are extremely compact and designed to be installed with chassis. The support infrastructure required for blade servers are supplied by the chassis, and their performance is comparable to that of rack servers.
The blade servers have relatively simple cabling, have better load balancing, and are very efficient through integrated Ethernet and fiber channel switches, thus driving for their increasing adoption. Additionally, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to co-locate racks will mainly opt for this type of servers.
Further, tower servers are mainly used in the stand-alone form, and provide cooling and scalability provisions. They have fairly complex cabling and are mainly compatible with high-end servers.
SMEs are the main end-users of these towers. Many tier 1 and tier 2 data centers from underdeveloped countries are also adopting these servers as they are available at affordable price points.
The top vendors highlighted by Technavio’s research analysts in this report are – Cisco Systems, Dell, HPE, IBM and Lenovo.