Worldwide Availability and Clustering Software 2008 Vendor Shares

This IDC study examines the availability and clustering software market (called the clustering and availability software [CLAS] market until 2007). The worldwide market size is provided for 2008, along with trends in the marketplace from 2006 to 2008. This study presents a vendor competitive analysis, along with total market revenue for 2008, and revenue shares for the leading (top 20) ACS vendors, including both large and small companies that provide ACS products. It study also provides brief profiles of the top vendors and identifies the characteristics that all vendors will need to be successful in the future.

"IDC notes an increasing trend for ACS providers to partner with virtualization providers, to ensure high availability for applications that are hosted by virtual machines (VMs)," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president, IDC Enterprise Server Platforms. "It is increasingly the case that traditional high-availability failover software includes support for both physical (P) and virtual (V) servers."

"To the extent that clustering or failover software is being positioned as too expensive or too complex, then some of the software vendors in the virtualized x86 server space may market their products as alternatives to traditional HA. That is, these vendors will position their products as eliminating the need for ACS products, leveraging VM migration and data replication to address the need to "restart" workloads and to have those workloads use production data that has been copied or replicated," Bozman said. "However, IDC believes that customers must carefully examine whether the virtualization offerings provide equivalent functionality as traditional ACS products. Often, a combination of ACS and virtualization software — often deployed with data replication software at customer sites — completes the overall HA deployments, ensuring that both planned downtime and unplanned downtime scenarios are addressed with a "spectrum" of HA software solutions."