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4 Customers Account for 20 Percent of Servers Shipped

A handful of the biggest cloud service providers are making an outsized impact on the global server market.

In releasing third-quarter data for the worldwide server market last week, analysts at IDC said that investments in hyperscale datacenter capacity expansion are aggressively reshaping the core server market.

"Over the past year, the top four customers in the server market, all of them cloud service providers, have accounted for more than 20 percent of all servers shipped worldwide, and over 10 percent of worldwide server revenue," said Kuba Stolarski, research manager for enterprise servers at IDC, in a statement.

Those four customers are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Alibaba, Stolarski said in an e-mail interview.

Hyperscale cloud service providers are using rack-optimized servers about 75 percent of the time and density-optimized servers about a quarter of the time, Stolarski said.

It's a trend that IDC doesn't expect will let up. "Public cloud demand for new servers will continue to outpace the general market over the next several years, as established enterprises and start-ups alike continue to ramp their usage of cloud services for infrastructure and application hosting," Stolarski said in the statement.

See here, here and here for previous coverage of the way trends toward cloud computing are concentrating and reshaping the server market.

Posted by Scott Bekker on December 08, 2014


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