This IDC study examines the demand for HA servers as a subset of the overall server market. Therefore, this is a derivative forecast, which should be viewed in context of the overall forecast for the worldwide server market from 2007 to 2011. Although clustering has been the predominant vehicle for improving server availability characteristics, the complexity that is often associated with these types of solutions in certain market segments has hampered more widespread acceptance," said Steve Josselyn, research director in IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group. "The ongoing improvement of standard server availability and customer acceptance of good-enough availability within some server workload segments have resulted in customers assessing the tradeoffs associated with cost and complexity over high availability. Any solution that can reduce the cost and complexity of implementing an HA solution will get the attention of customers."

"The increasing importance of virtualization within the scale-out server world (primarily volume servers priced less than $25,000) will strengthen the case for deploying HA software that can ensure the safe delivery of workloads from one virtual server to another," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group. "Therefore, clustering, replication, and other HA computing techniques will prove to be key in supporting smooth operations in scale-out deployments of small volume servers for enterprise applications and workloads. Formerly, the software that ensured safe management of workloads was 'under the hood' of scalable SMP server systems; now, there will be increased attention on scale-out deployments that require layered software products to address the same operational requirements."