The server market is taking off again after three years of slowing growth, said research firm IDC.
According to IDC’s quarterly report, the server market grew six per cent year over year, to $13.1 billion U.S. for the second quarter of 2007. The firm attributed the growth to users refreshing servers used in their data centers and to expanded distributed-workload deployments.
Servers priced under $25,000 sustained the largest growth: 11 per cent year over year. Meanwhile, growth of midrange enterprise servers (priced between $25,000 and $499,000) was less than one per cent, and high-end enterprise servers (costing more than $500,000) showed an almost two per cent increase.
IBM led the server market with a 31per cent revenue share, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co. with a market share of more than 28 per cent. Sales of System x, System z and System p servers accounted for the majority of IBM’s server revenue, while HP’s growth could be attributed to ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, IDC said. IBM mainframes running the z/OS operating system accounted for 9.5 per cent of all server revenue in the second quarter.
Sun’s server revenue grew almost six per cent year over year; the company is the No. 3 player with 13 per cent of the market. Dell, which showed more than a 20 per cent revenue growth in x86 servers, followed Sun.
On the operating system front, Linux servers represented almost 14 per cent of server revenue. Microsoft Windows accounted for 38 per cent of server revenue, and Unix system revenue tallied in at 32 per cent of the market.
In x86-based servers, HP led the market with a share of more than 35 per cent, followed by Dell with more than 22 per cent and IBM with 17.5 per cent.
The blade server market also soared, with revenue growing 37 per cent year over year. Blade servers accounted for $875 million, or 6.5 per cent of the server market. HP held more than 47 per cent of the blade server market, followed by IBM with 32 per cent.
