According to IDC, a market-research firm in Framingham, Massachusetts, annual sales of Infiniband servers could be worth $7.7 billion by 2005.No matter how rosy the projections, however, Infiniband server firms could find those riches harder to come by than they previously imagined.
One reason is the growth of "managed hosting" where, instead of renting space on a farm for their own servers, firms rent the computing capacity along with the power and network connectivity.
BEA Systems, a server software firm, may be the worst off, with stock that's trading 40% lower than it was a year ago.
"This is the most complex undertaking ever attempted in software," says William Coleman, who cofounded Oracle rival BEA Systems and now runs server-tech firm Cassatt.
Each represents an attempt to breach the defenses of one of the 65,000 servers his firm, Akamai Technologies, has tucked away in data centers around the globe.
It is vital that there is enough processing power, hard disk space (and HDD speed) and cache to accommodate all of the virtual servers that firms are planning to roll out, along with some extra for failover.
For one thing, it said, News International provided it with only a limited selection of e-mails in five electronic folders on the company server; the law firm was "not given free rein to look through whatever it wanted".
And not a single automaker, food server or construction firm at all.
Why should customers endure the headache of buying servers from one firm, storage boxes from another, and software management from a third?
