Just a couple of years ago few people even knew what micro-servers were and even fewer recognized potential. But it looks like the times are changing as according to a new market research report from MarketsAndMarkets company, the total market for next generation memory is expected to reach $26.55 billion by 2018 at an estimated CAGR of 62.3% from 2013 to 2018.

Micro servers are an emerging form factor of servers designed to process low intensive workloads like lightweight web serving; simple content delivery nodes and low end dedicated hosting. They are basically low power servers consisting of several nodes that share a common architecture. Micro servers were developed as a cost effective solution to reduce power consumption of large datacenters. Micro servers have an extraordinary dense and power saving design in which fans and power supply are shared by tens or potentially, hundreds of server nodes. This efficiency leads to the elimination of space and power consumption of redundant components. The micro servers presently costs up to 63% percent less than the conventional servers, according to MarketsAndMarkets.

Micro servers presently account for 2.3% of the total server sales however looking at the current growth rate, in the next five years it is expected to reach 25 to 30% per cent of the global server market.

Large corporations are actively using these services to reduce server overheads. However, it is expected to proliferate into the medium and small sized businesses aggressively due to the realization of cost benefits offered by it. Intel Corp.’s processors dominate the market presently with Xeon products, but both Intel and its arch-rival AMD are working on special system-on-chips for micro-servers. Moreover, when various companies among partners of ARM Holding’s release their 64-bit server-oriented ARMv8-compatible system-on-chipsi in 2014, they will definitely change the market dynamics, according to MaM.

The major application of micro servers are media storage and data centers applications. The media storage application has the largest share of market presently; however data centers application will overtake it by 2018. Other important applications are analytics as well as cloud computing. As online businesses are growing at a rapid speed and there is huge usage of internet, cloud computing applications will grow at a phenomenal rate. It is forecasted that cloud computing application will grow at the highest CAGR from 2013 to 2018.

Taking the geography into consideration, North America is the largest market for micro servers as the largest number of micro server manufacturers are based in this region. Also the media storage and data centers application of micro servers have huge market in this region. Europe is the second largest market of micro servers presently; however it will be overtaken by APAC by 2018.

The major players in the mcro-servers market currently include Advanced Micro Devices and its SeaMicro division, Intel Corporation, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Numerous other companies, including Applied Micro, Calxeda, Fujitsu, Samsung Electronics and other will also become significant players going forward.

Tags: x86, ARM, AMD, SeaMicro, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, HP, Dell, Applied Micro, Calxeda, Fujitsu, Samsung, Marvell, Jaguar, Atom