Linux servers surge

Trade

Huge demand for Linux servers has helped push the overall server market to new heights, according to IDC’s worldwide quarterly server tracker.

Factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew by 5.3 per cent year over year to $12.1 billion in the first quarter of 2005, marking the eighth consecutive quarter of positive overall revenue growth.

Linux server sales enjoyed their eleventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 35.2 per cent and unit shipments up by 31.1 per cent.

The study noted that customers continue to expand the role of Linux servers into an ever-increasing array of workloads in both the commercial and technical segments of the market.

Sales of Windows servers enjoyed strong growth, as revenues and unit shipments grew by 12.3 per cent and 10.7 per cent respectively year over year in Q1.

Significantly, quarterly revenue of $4.2 billion for Windows servers represented 34.4 per cent of overall quarterly factory revenue, for the first time pulling even with quarterly revenue in the Unix server market.

Unix servers experienced 2.8 per cent revenue growth year over year and five per cent unit shipment growth over Q1 of 2004.

IDC found that volume server revenue grew by 15.6 per cent in Q1 year over year and continues to represent the primary growth engine for the server market overall.

Revenue for mid-range enterprise servers grew by 6.1 per cent year over year, marking the second consecutive quarterly increase in that segment.

IDC believes this may reflect increased IT spending to run more scalable workloads and consolidation/virtualisation initiatives than can be deployed on volume servers.

However, the enterprise server market, which grew from Q4 2003 through Q3 2004, declined by 13.9 per cent year over year, its second consecutive quarter of reduced spending.

IDC speculated that one factor in this drop could be continued price compression, which reduces average sales prices for servers from the high-end enterprise into the mid-range enterprise space.

“While the market is not accelerating at the same pace that it did in 2004, IT spending remained strong in the first quarter as customers continued to invest in new infrastructure,” said Matt Eastwood, programme vice -president of worldwide server research at IDC.

Among manufacturers, IDC’s research found that IBM held on to its top ranking in the worldwide server systems market with 28.3 per cent, followed by Hewlett-Packard on 27.6 per cent. Dell and Sun came next in factory revenue with 10.8 per cent and 9.9 per cent shares respectively.

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