Leaving Dell and HPE, off-brand server competitors have shown a high push in the market growth with giants like Amazon and Google, though enterprise data centers have shown reluctance to follow the same. The server market which was stagnant has flared up over the past few years, as “white box” server vendors have been showing an increase in the share of the cloud business.
Enterprises have shown high reluctance to go along with the hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, majorly due to lack of service equivalent to enterprise-grade and the maintenance options available with them.
“White box” are referred as off-brand PCs which are made by PC vendors (independent). These PC’s are liked by buyers, who built their own Personal Computers with no vendor label on it. So, in the server market, “white box” is referred to all the vendors that are not one of the big three’s i.e Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.
In the 2nd quarter of this year as per IDC, Dell EMC sold 574,000 units leading the list, followed by HPE which sold 443,000 units and Lenovo at third position with 224,000 sold units. Just to note the next three players were not the familiar data center vendor’s i.e Cisco, Oracle, or Nutanix. China’s Inspur with 203,000 units led the fourth position and China’s Huawei sold 187,000 units, and U.S based Super Micro sold 175,000 in the year 2019. The remaining units sold were tossed into a group called ODM Direct. It accounted for close to 732,000 units.
The sold units from the non-big-three vendors went exclusively to hyperscale data-center vendors. The main names being Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Equinix, Cloudflare and other companies building data centers spread over acres of land. The report on White Box Server market by Value Market Research foresees high market growth in the next six years.
As per IDC, Fortune 500 companies are sticking to the brands. White-box server builds has been dragging to infiltrate enterprises, the reason being twofold, as per Ashish Nadkarni who is the group vice president for worldwide infrastructure at IDC. White boxes are gaining momentum at places where they get volume or have original design requirements. Enterprises fail in this as this does not match their requirement set.
Naira Shekhawat has been into Content Writing just after completing her Graduation in English Literature. Her love for words has won her many accolades in her respective jobs ever since. Naira covers business sections for VMR News. She is a traveller by heart and loves writing on food blogs as a freelancer.