Worldwide Availability and Clustering Software 2008-2012 Forecast

This IDC study presents 2007 revenue data and provides a five-year forecast for the worldwide availability and clustering software (ACS) market. The availability and clustering software market (formerly called the clustering and availability software [CLAS] market) continued to grow in calendar-year 2007 across geographic regions and server operating environments.

"During the year, the collision between virtualization software technologies and traditional availability and clustering software was clearly taking place, as most ACS high-availability software products supported both physical servers and virtual servers," says Jean S. Bozman, research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group. "This trend demonstrates that the need to preserve availability remains important for IT managers and business organizations, even as virtualization is rapidly adopted in the x86 server market worldwide. The ability to migrate virtual machines (VMs) is a powerful way to protect workloads, especially in cases of planned downtime. However, the increasing virtualization of x86 servers is also giving rise to a need to provide more protection to x86 servers against unplanned downtime that would take some, or all, of the hosted VMs offline."