According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, global white box server shipments surpassed 30 percent market share in 3Q18. Alibaba is the latest Cloud hyperscaler to adopt white box.
“The Top 4 U.S. Cloud service providers—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook—were the first to adopt white box servers in order to drive a greater degree of hardware customization, efficiencies, and cost-reduction benefits in their data centers,” said Baron Fung, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Alibaba recently adopted white box servers with the current server refresh cycle. We expect other Cloud hyperscalers that currently deploy branded servers to consider white box adoption next year as they continue to scale. This will have important long-term implications in the Cloud server vendor landscape,” explained Fung.
Additional highlights from the 3Q18 Server Quarterly Report:
Cloud hyperscale data center Capex are on track for double-digit growth in 2018. Slower growth is projected in 2019. The Enterprise server refresh cycle continued for the third straight quarter. However, Enterprise growth is expected to slow in 2019 as the server refresh cycle subsides. Vendors continue to report strong revenue growth as server average selling prices increased Y/Y, primarily due to the richer configuration of the Xeon Scalable platform.
