Worldwide Server Clustering 2006 - 2009 Forecast: Trends from an End-User Perspective

This IDC study examines the changing dynamics of the server market, including the need for highly available data and highly available applications, both of which are key factors that are accelerating the move toward server clustering.

There are many reasons for clustering servers together: achieving high availability for data and applications, improving workload balancing across multiple servers, achieving scalability for selected workloads that lend themselves to parallel processing, and managing a group of servers as a single, virtual computing resource.

"Although all are important reasons for deploying clustered servers, the goal of achieving high availability is still the leading reason for clustering," said Matthew Eastwood, program vice president, Enterprise Server Research.

"Server vendors should support the trend to cluster servers together by offering a number of preconfigured clustered server configurations that can be deployed rapidly and maintained easily," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president, IDC's Global Enterprise Server Solutions. "Going forward, it will be important to consider the full spectrum of scenarios for achieving and maintaining high uptime levels for mission-critical workloads, including hardware redundancy, deployment of virtualization software on individual servers, and deployment of clustering software across servers."