1

In this issue

New Server Deployment Strategies Energize the Telco Industry 2

Predicts 2016: Servers Changing Roles in the Data Center 4

Driving Network Transformation 13

Multiple Paths to IT Modernization 16

About Intel & Red Hat 18

Enabling Telecommunications Carriers Servers at the Heart of IT Modernization

April 2016

2

New Server Deployment Strategies Energize the Telco Industry

The drive to reduce costs and increase agility in the

telecommunications sector has led operators toward fresh

approaches for implementing network infrastructures—

leveraging recent advances in software-defined networking

(SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). These

technologies offer a means to decouple networking

functions from the physical hardware and replace

traditional network devices, such as switches and routers,

with software appliances. SDN and NFV deployments

have progressed from testing and proofs of concept to

carrier-grade implementations that are appearing across

the industry and streamlining the design, development,

and deployment of services and applications. Among the

key findings from Gartner included in this publication:

“Software appliances will use servers to displace

networking equipment, a trend that is already displacing

hardware in web-scale environments. Simpler networking

hardware will displace budgets from capital to license to

maintenance.”

Intel and Red Hat are at the forefront of this network

transformation, having developed and co-engineered

many of the modular components that are today

enabling commercial use of SDN/NFV technologies. The

Intel® Open Network Platform (Intel® ONP), a reference

architecture, gives telecom service providers a blueprint

for creating a proven, reliable network infrastructures

based on an SDN/NFV framework. Intel hardware

architecture and the latest Intel® Xeon® processor

technology provides a standardized platform optimized

and tuned for Red Hat’s enterprise-ready operating

system, cloud-based software stack, network management

tools, and virtualization environment. The combination

of these components provides a solid basis for telecom

service providers to manage network installations from

a centralized console, scale rapidly up and down using

virtualized network appliances to adapt to traffic bursts or

changes in data flow, and significantly reduce maintenance

tasks by automating many network operations.

3

More about Red Hat’s vision for building fast, efficient

network infrastructures can be found at redhat.com/

infrastructure. Intel offers guidance and resources

for IT modernization through Intel® Network Builders

(http://networkbuilders.intel.com), an ecosystem

for accelerating SDN and NFV deployments, and

Intel® Builders (https://builders.intel.com) programs,

accelerating solutions to drive data center innovation. To

download Intel ONP references and files, visit Intel® Open

Source (https://01.org/packet-processing/intel®-onp).

The Gartner research notes included in this

publication, from Predicts 2016: Servers Changing

Roles in the Data Center, concluded that servers are

about to take a broader role in data center architecture

and recommends that data center managers must

plan new server deployment strategies for 2018, to cut

costs and gain flexibility. The following sections focus

on the nature of these changes and the implications

for the industry.

Source: Red Hat / Intel

4

Servers are about to take a broader role in data

center architecture, as new memory capabilities,

software network appliances and hyperconverged

architectures make current hardware obsolete. Data

center managers must plan new server deployment

strategies for 2018, to cut costs and gain flexibility.

Key Findings

■ New memory technologies will increase server

memory footprints by five to 10 times, inside

current cost envelopes. 5TB servers will become

affordable, enabling new implementations of

transaction processing, analytics and machine

learning.

■ Software appliances will use servers to displace

networking equipment, a trend that is already

displacing hardware in Web-scale environments.

Simpler networking hardware will displace

budgets from capital to license and maintenance.

■ Hyperconverged systems will turn into software

appliances, boosting servers to 70% of data

center purchases and materially increasing data

center transaction bandwidth.

Recommendations

■ Inventory applications that can use large

memory footprints, and make remediation plans

to accommodate new memory technologies

before 2018.

■ Design budgets to shift from capital networking

equipment purchases, to servers running

network functional software under license and

maintenance agreements.

Research From Gartner

Predicts 2016: Servers Changing Roles in the Data Center

5

■ Identify, optimize and capture budget savings

available from HCIS deployments, as HCIS

software displaces stand-alone storage hardware.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2018, 15% of server memory bits will use in-metal

memory technology.

By 2018, 20% of new server capacity will be used to

displace networking and security equipment, up from

less than 2% today.

By 2018, 70% of hyperconverged infrastructure sales

will be license-only on Tier 1 servers.

Analysis

This document was revised on 9 December 2015. The

document you are viewing is the corrected version.

For more information, see the Corrections page on

gartner.com.

Servers are subject to three major forces that will

change the shape of the data center. First, Web-scale

technology is driving standardization, pricing and

operating costs to new lows. Taking advantage of these

servers opens cost reduction opportunities across data

center infrastructure.

Second, new memory technologies that provide flash

memory scale but DRAM-like properties will enable

servers to take on complex applications at a fraction

of today’s cost. Large memory systems could drop

to a fraction of today’s price, offering 5x or 10x

capability improvements. Both Intel-Micron (3D

XPoint) and HP (memristor) are promising delivery of

these technologies.

Third, network functional virtualization can drive out

the need to buy hardware for security or application

management. Instead, open source or maintained

software, running on a server, can provide agility and

flexibility at a fraction of the price of a rack appliance.

Application delivery controllers and network security

appliances are already moving to software, affecting

the growth of the hardware network appliance market.

Finally, a hyperconverged integrated system (HCIS)

brings new scalability and flexibility to compute

and storage requirements. HCIS brings easy system

scalability, and its interweaving with compute capacity

improves its transaction bandwidth by reducing

network chokepoints. It is important to deploy

these technologies now, to take advantage of the

performance and flexibility they offer as appliances.

All-software versions should emerge by 2018,

increasing flexibility and choice.

6

What You Need to Know

Data center managers can make significant gains

in performance and cost by taking advantage of

these emerging technologies. The key is to inventory

applications and functions now, and plan how to

deploy them in 2018 or sooner, against these new

opportunities and requirements. In 2018, we expect

Intel’s Purley platform to deploy, bringing these new

technologies into the mainstream.

In the interim, we will see new classes of Peripheral

Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) nonvolatile

storage emerge — late in 2016 or early in 2017 —

that can act as caches for solid-state drive (SSD)

main storage. By caching frequent reads and writes,

main storage can move to less expensive multilevel

cell flash, without concern of exceeding lifetime write

limits.

■ Audit your applications. Identify those that will

benefit from large nonvolatile memory footprints,

and put plans in place to take advantage of the

new technology in 2018. Follow Intel’s roadmap

announcements and align your plans with Intel’s

Purley technology refresh.

■ Identify networking functions that can be replaced

with software components, and build roadmaps to

integrate them into your data center architecture.

Work with your data center providers to identify

and implement these opportunities.

■ Plan to implement hyperconverged systems in

2016, taking advantage of their flexibility, capacity

and performance to support agile development

and deployment.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2018, 15% of server memory bits will use in-metal memory technology.

Analysis by: Martin Reynolds

Key Findings:

DRAM is the staple today for server main memory.

However, the physical limitations of storing a

measurable charge at the surface layer of a piece of

silicon constrains DRAM density and cost advances.

Flash memory solves the problem by building 3D

structures in the metal, with 64 layers delivering

128Gb (16GB) flash memories. However, these

memories are slow. First, because they require a block

write, rather than a row write. A block write requires all

rows in the block to be erased and rewritten. Second,

they use multiple charge levels to store multiple bits

per cell. This process is very sensitive, and requires

continuous voltage and timing optimization.

There are other approaches to moving the memory

element off of the surface silicon, and into the metal

array. In-metal memory scales with the number of

layers, and leaves the silicon surface area open for

control elements. The challenge is finding a storage

element that works well in the metal array.

The leader — until recently — was HP’s memristor

technology, which stores data as ions that migrate

across a layer of titanium dioxide. The storage

elements can be tiny, as the ions are far more robust

and stable than electronic charge stores. However, HP

has never demonstrated working silicon.

7

In 2015, Intel announced the in-metal product 3D

XPoint that appears to have similar characteristics to

the memristor. Intel is secretive about the memory

element, but we believe it to be a form of phase

change memory (PCM) that Intel and Micron have

scaled down to tiny dimensions. Intel has publicly

demonstrated the technology in an SSD, shown

technology diagrams and disclosed key parameters,

and leaked roadmaps that show that 3D XPoint will be

mainstream in 2018.

Our belief is that this memory, based on existing

PCM products, will have a cycle time in the 100

nanoseconds (ns) read and 300ns write range. These

speeds are slower than DRAM, but adequate for many

large memory projects.

Indications, based on wafer images and die size,

are that this memory has a density comparable with

advanced NAND flash, but at two layers rather than 64

layers. Therefore, manufacturing costs will be similar

to those of flash memory. Performance will be close to

DRAM, with the added benefit of nonvolatility.

If the technology succeeds, it will benefit from

existing layer and multilevel storage capability, and

has many years of growth ahead. Given the public

demonstrations, and barring some kind of unforeseen

problems, this technology will go from demonstration

to mainstream over the next three years.

Market Implications:

We anticipate that Intel will drive this technology

into the server market, targeting applications that

require large main memory systems. There are several

implications to this strategy.

Pricing will be carefully managed. At $3 per GB, we

believe that the product will achieve 80% margins.

However, mainstream DRAM is priced at about $4 per

GB, and server memory — bought through the vendor

— can be 10 or 20 times this amount. These margins

are important to server profits, and suppliers will hold

prices high rather than expand the memory market.

Therefore, to expand the market, Intel will have to

drive end-user demand through its sales engineers,

and create processes that allow servers to be delivered

with this new memory but without the traditional

memory markup.

We believe that a 5TB system will cost tens of

thousands of dollars, rather than hundreds of

thousands of dollars. This price reduction will open

up new markets for in-memory computing; online,

complex transaction processing; large-scale analytics;

“cool” virtual machines (VMs) (little used, but needing

a fast response); and scaled-up applications based

on DBMS that scale best with large memory systems,

which cover most vendors other than Oracle.

8

We estimate that there is capacity — and need — for

this technology to represent about 15% of all server

bits shipped in 2018. As these chips are only about

10% of the size of a DRAM chip, there is plenty of

manufacturing capacity available. Also, these chips

will not replace DRAM in the foreseeable future (within

five years). Instead, they will significantly increase

the number of servers shipped with large memory

footprints. They will, however, add downward pricing

pressure to DRAM.

Recommendations:

Applications require work in several areas to use these

large memory systems.

Nonvolatility is one of the most important aspects of

this new technology. There are four implications for

server users:

■ Security — Although we expect that platform

memory encryption will be available, there are

always surprises. Recycled, stolen or seized

servers will potentially contain recoverable data

in storage formerly presumed to be lost when the

power is lost. Therefore, sensitive data may still

need to be encrypted, using a volatile key in DRAM

loaded from an external server.

■ Consistent state — One of the benefits of

nonvolatile memory (NVM) is the ability to rapidly

recover from a system failure. However, to do

this, the NVM must always have a consistent,

recoverable state. Applications need to be tuned to

guarantee that the NVM is always fully recoverable

without state errors.

■ Storage drivers — If the application cannot take

advantage of the NVM, a memory-based storage

driver can convert the space into extremely fast

storage. Although not as efficient as coding for

fast main memory, this approach can substantially

accelerate applications with minimal effort.

■ Booting — It should be possible to create a small

boot partition in the NVM, eliminating the power

and cost of hard disk or SSD boot drives.

There are other aspects that drive the need to tune

applications. As this memory is somewhat slower than

DRAM, it is important to keep code in DRAM space.

This need will drive new options in operating systems

and server management.

Also, the very large memory footprint will require

multiple processor threads to remain active to use the

memory space. Processors will need to keep the DRAM

busy. As such, there is a trade-off between the number

of cores, core performance features, cache efficiency

and memory transaction bandwidth to manage.

9

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2018, 20% of new server capacity will be used to displace networking and security equipment, up from less than 2% today.

Analysis by: Joe Skorupa

Key Findings:

IT organizations from mid-market to Web-scale

service providers are adopting new ways to build and

service networks. Instead of deploying dedicated

hardware appliances, they are deploying software

instances in off-the-shelf servers. This approach is

often called network function virtualization (NFV). For

example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) incorporates

an application delivery controller (ADC) as one of its

per-use services. This ADC is not a physical device:

rather, it is a customized software instance, written

and tuned by Amazon that runs on server capacity

on an as-needed basis. It can be sold on a per-use

schedule, or as structured payments. The key is, these

ADCs work just like a physical ADC, but the associated

server revenue does not form part of the ADC market

revenue. Similar trends are forming around firewalls

(e.g., VMware’s NSX firewall), and intrusion detection

system/intrusion prevention system/data loss

prevention (IDS/IPS/DLP) security appliances.

In the WAN, many service providers are looking to

virtualize existing customer premises equipment

(CPE), including branch office routers and

firewalls, with software instances running on server

infrastructure (NFV) located within service provider

data centers.

Market Implications:

Buyers will see broader choices in terms of

deployment options — physical appliance, virtualized

physical appliance, virtual appliance offered as

a service by their cloud provider, and embedded

within the WAN and offered as a service. While fit-for-

purpose choices will be a positive trend, it can lead

to management complexity since no single vendor

offers a complete solution under a single management

framework, and multivendor management platforms

are limited at this point.

Traditional Layer 4-7 (L4-7) vendors will be torn

between their need to preserve exiting hardware-

centric revenue streams while attempting to satisfy

customer demand for more flexible deployment

software-centric options. Additional pressure will come

from Web-scale providers such as Amazon, Google and

Microsoft, which developed its own ADC software as

well as supported open-source vendors. Discounting

virtual editions of traditional dedicated appliances to

compensate for the cost of the associated servers will

diminish vendor revenue further.

These trends align with those in the hyperconverged

systems market, where networking, virtualization and

storage systems are integrated into a single, scalable

module. Just as with the large Web-scale providers,

enterprise data centers will bend toward more

servers and fewer dedicated networking and storage

subsystems. Such a data center could easily spend

more than 70% of its hardware budget on servers, up

from about 40% today (based on average data center

spend numbers).

10

Recommendations:

End users should:

■ Not assume hardware is required for network

and security functions that have previously been

delivered in an appliance form factor.

■ Pilot new virtualized deployment options to

reduce costs and gain flexibility for network and

security buyers, but to also ensure that adequate

performance remains. Subscription pricing, total

capacity pricing (instead of instance pricing) and

site licensing/volume discounts can reduce costs.

■ Calculate the costs/savings of managing this new

mixed deployment model before committing to

server-based deployments. Include integration

and the cost of additional x86 and virtualization

licenses as well as operational concerns.

■ Build implementation cost cases for physical and

virtual implementations, and use them to decide

when to implement a new deployment strategy.

■ Prefer software options that align with existing

management tools.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2018, 70% of hyperconverged infrastructure sales will be license-only on Tier 1 servers.

Analysis by: Martin Reynolds

Key Findings:

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a $1.1 billion market

in 2015, growing at 68% a year to $4 billion in 2018.

The fundamental premise is powerful. By distributing

storage across the network using storage management

software integrated with a hypervisor, applications can

be close to their data. Furthermore, the distributed

computing capacity enables sophisticated storage

management features.

The performance optimizations needed by storage

area network (SAN) architectures are eliminated, so

the overall cost drops. Networking becomes more

efficient as hot spots are distributed across multiple

links. And finally, the virtualization and management

capabilities provide for agility in application

deployment and provisioning.

Nutanix, the largest HCIS provider, is already on

track to deliver a software version of its product,

as evidenced by its hardware partnerships with

Lenovo and Dell. SimpliVity brings another angle: an

accelerator card that performs compression for each

server and provides nonvolatile memory for transaction

integrity. However, the card blocks a software-only

implementation, but we believe that the benefits of the

card are outweighed by a software implementation and

anticipate that SimpliVity has to shift to software-only

to capture growth.

11

The combination of performance improvement,

flexibility and agility, and lower costs, are a compelling

reason to move to HCIS. Furthermore, the rich margins

associated with enterprise disk storage fuel investment

and growth for these emerging companies.

Market Implications:

To capture the storage profits, the provider has to sell

the drives. Selling the drives means that they have to

be in a server, or at least directly attached in the rack.

Consequently, the HCIS providers today are biased

toward hardware sales. Their hardware products

are not in the same league as those from the major

providers, with immature support networks, limited

global reach, and the need to design servers as a

secondary skill.

Therefore, a licensed software model becomes an

imperative for sustained growth. Users will purchase

the licenses as part of a packaged system from a

major provider, or add the software to existing or new

hardware.

Nutanix is already moving to a software model. Its

partnerships with Dell and Lenovo give the company’s

products global reach in terms of sales, support,

distribution and configuration centers. The breadth of

configurations and form factors available from these

suppliers makes the HCIS product easier to assimilate.

Therefore, buyers can choose between a configured

system from a major vendor, self-branded hardware

from the HCIS provider, or software for installation on

a platform of choice. Buyers focused on agility and

simplicity will select the appliance approach; buyers

focused on manageability and cost will tend toward a

software solution.

There are two forces at play. The first is the reduction

of profits associated with enterprise drives as

HCIS makes the components part of the Web-scale

movement. The second is the need of the HCIS

vendors to expand their markets by shifting to sales on

top of established data center server providers.

The net result is a shift of profits from hardware,

where the greater margin contribution comes from

incremental storage drives, to licensed software,

which could, for example, be based on the drives and

capacity attached to a server.

12

This shift will be material. Our forecast shows HCIS

systems at $5 billion by 2020, compared with $24.5

billion of external storage. Therefore, HCIS systems

will be 15% of total storage spend, or 5% of the total

budget. With the virtual machine capacity included,

HCIS could foreseeably become 20% of data center

spend — where it works well — in 2018.

As it matures, HCIS might also provide a compelling

platform for networking components. Its distributed

nature, high connectivity and available processing

resources allow software networking components

to readily scale with demand. Therefore, the shift to

HCIS software is part of a larger move in data center

infrastructure that will result in most of the hardware

budget moving to servers.

Recommendations:

■ Seriously consider software-based HCIS to

leverage existing infrastructure and reduce

capital expenditure (capex) as well as operating

expenditure (opex).

■ Plan to shift up to 20% of your infrastructure

deployment to HCIS by 2018, if it works for you.

■ Identify, optimize and capture budget savings

available from HCIS deployments.

■ Leverage HCIS agility to capture business-unit led

projects.

A Look Back

This topic area is too new to have on-target or missed

predictions.

Evidence

The analysis and insight presented here are based

on the contributing analysts’ regular tracking of

the industry. This is achieved through frequent

engagements and discussions with market

participants, including communications service

providers (CSPs), network equipment providers

and other market participants. This deep industry

knowledge/insight is then used by the contributing

analysts to anticipate the future of the industry. The

predictions also had to undergo a rigorous internal

peer review process.

Source: Gartner Core Research Note G00293310, Martin Reynolds, Joe Skorupa, 04 December 2015

13

Driving Network Transformation

As Gartner states in their notes,

IT organizations are increasingly

adopting new ways to build and

service networks, as part of a strong

trend toward replacing physical

network appliances with software-

centric virtualized appliances running

on standard high-volume servers.

Network hardware equipment, such

as firewalls, switches, and branch

office routers, can be effectively

replaced and more efficiently

managed by deploying software

instances running on infrastructures

using NFV technologies and

centralized management tools with

a full view of the virtualized network

architecture.

Intel is helping drive this

transformation of commercial

network infrastructures, providing

a reference architecture—Intel

ONP—for infrastructure building,

participating in standards bodies

and consortia to create a framework

for development, contributing to a

number of open-source community

projects from which the software

stack is derived, and working with

independent software vendors to

collaboratively develop solutions

that can be deployed in this type of

virtualized network environment.

Figure 1 shows the areas of

involvement to enable markets with

Intel ONP.

14

The latest release of the reference architecture, Intel

ONP 2.1, includes updates to stay current with the

latest SDN/NFV enabling open source ingredients.

Support is provided for the OpenDaylight Beryllium

release and the latest version of the Data Plane

Development Kit, 2.2.0, which increases packet

throughput on Intel architecture-based platforms.

Integration with the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600

v4, with 22 available cores per processor and up to

88 threads per dual processor platform. All of these

advances are consistent with Intel’s commitment to

provide an architectural framework ideally suited for

commercial-scale SDN/NFV deployments and ready

for carrier-grade implementations. Figure 2 shows

the test and validation environment for SDN and NFV

network implementations.

Figure 1. Market enablement with Intel® Open Network Platform

Source: Intel

15

in tandem with Red Hat and other industry leaders.

At the center of a growing ecosystem focused on

SDN and NFV technologies, Intel and Red Hat are

continuing to co-engineer the solutions to drive

network transformation forward.

Source: Intel

Gartner projects that data centers will continue to

invest in servers, gradually phasing out dedicated

networking and storage subsystems, estimating

that hardware budgets for servers will rise to 70

percent, up from 40 percent today. Intel helps meet

this demand with hardware platforms that can

accommodate the latest SDN and NFV technologies

with optimized features and capabilities developed

OpenStack*

OpenDaylight*

Enhancements

Intel® ONP Intel® ONPSoftware

Intel® ONPHardware

DeveloperNetwork Functions

NIC

VMVMVM

Open vSwitch*DPDK

Linux*/KVM*

NIC Intel® Architecture-Based Server

Intel® Architecture-Based Server

VMVMVM

Open vSwitch*DPDK

Linux*/KVM*

Enhancements

Source: Intel

Figure 2. Intel® Open Network Platform test and validation environment

16

Multiple Paths to IT Modernization

Red Hat offers multiple paths to IT modernization, ranging

from selective upgrading of traditional infrastructure

components to establishing modern infrastructures that

take advantage of software-defined networking, software-

defined storage, advanced virtualization technologies,

and cloud-native deployments. For those telecom

operators exploring the advantages of the latest SDN/

NFV technologies as a way to better manage network

infrastructures, reduce capital costs, and gain more

flexibility in deploying products and services, Red Hat

offers solutions well suited to these goals.

Working collaboratively with Intel, Red Hat is helping

develop the components to support widespread adoption

of SDN and NFV throughout the marketplace. This

includes building, testing, and deploying carrier-grade

solutions based on NFV and providing the technologies

and software ingredients to construct commercial,

production-ready network infrastructures.

In a number of engagements, Intel and Red Hat have

shown the viability of SDN and NFV for commercial

applications. For example, as covered in the whitepaper

titled “Going Virtual: Intel and Red Hat Demonstrate

SDN Service Chaining Solutions” (http://www.intel.

com/content/www/us/en/communications/red-hat-sdn-

onp-white-paper.html), the two companies completed a

project showing the benefits of dynamic service chaining

as a means to more efficiently route network traffic in a

virtualized SDN/NFV environment. Intel ONP provided

the reference architecture that supported the SDN and

NFV vendor solutions. Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform

powered by an Intel Xeon processor-based server provided

the foundation for the demonstration. The demonstration

proved the effectiveness of incorporating dynamic service

chaining within an SDN framework to control traffic by

automatically optimizing the number and sequence of

service functions.

17

In another joint project designed as a proof of concept

for HP’s implementation of a network functions

virtualization infrastructure (NFVI), Intel® architecture

and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and OpenStack®

were core parts of the project. This engagement is

documented in the Intel whitepaper “Transforming

Networks with NFVI, HP Carrier-Grade Servers, and

Intel” (http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/

public/us/en/documents/white-papers/hp-onp-

packet-processing-benchmark-paper.pdf).

Red Hat and Intel have been involved in a number of

similar projects and also collaborated on the work

refining the open-source software stack that is the

heart of Intel ONP, including contributions to many of

the related upstream projects: the OpenStack cloud

OS, OpenDaylight controller, Linux Fedora OS, KVM

Hypervisor, and RDO. These projects have helped

streamline SDN/NFV deployments across the industry.

Co-engineering work between Intel and Red Hat has

also resulted in optimized application performance

when leveraging x86-based hardware architectures

used in the standard high-volume servers that

provide the platform for most of today’s SDN/NFV

deployments.

Telecommunications service providers addressing

the challenges of big data, rapidly changing industry

demands, and digitally transformed business models

have been able to achieve agility, interoperability, and

cost-effectiveness using Red Hat® solutions and by

obtaining consulting services from Red Hat. The server

modernization challenges described by Gartner in this

publication are well within the scope and capabilities

of a wide range of Red Hat® solutions.

Source: Red Hat

Enabling Telecommunications Carriers is published by Intel and Red Hat. Editorial content supplied by Intel and Red Hat is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of Intel and Red Hat’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website.

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