IT News & Views

Worldwide factory server revenues increased 17.9% in Q2 to $13.2 billion according to IDC.

Server shipments increased 8.5% to 2.1 million units, one of the highest totals ever in Q2.

Improvements were made across all three server classes: volume, midrange enterprise and high-end enterprise: x86 volume systems were up 16.6%, mid-range Unix systems by 16.7% and high-end mainframe-class systems by 22.8%.

IDC's outlook for the second half, however, is less buoyant. It thinks "weakening macroeconomic conditions around the world will serve to moderate demand for new servers later this year."

Given its mainframe position IBM was first globally with 30.5% market share and HP, some of whose servers could be in flux given its decision to dump its PC unit, held 29.8% market share.

IBM was up 24.5% in factory revenue. HP was up 9.3% on x86 ProLiant servers and blades. Dell remained in third place with 13.8% of the factory revenues, up 5.1%. Oracle was good for 7.2%, up 4.2% on Exadata systems, and Fujitsu got 6.5% of the market share of factory revenues, up 133.6% as a direct result of the large-scale K-computer HPC system in Japan.

The market for non-x86 servers, including servers based on RISC, Itanium and CISC processors, increased 23.3% to $4.8 billion, growing faster than the market overall.

Unix servers were up 1.5% to $2.9 billion. IBM's Unix server revenue increased 14% gaining it six points of Unix server market share.

IBM's z servers were up 61.1% to $1.2 billion, representing 9% of quarterly server revenue worldwide.

Linux server demand grew 47.5% to $2.7 billion and represented 20.5% of all server revenue in the quarter thanks to Fujitsu.

Windows server demand was up 12.4%, good for $5.9 billion or 45.5% of overall quarterly factory revenue and 71% of all quarterly server shipments.

IDC said Unix, hard-hit in the 2009-2010 economic downturn, benefited from mission-critical workloads needing more room for workload consolidation, combined with net-new demand from customers who are building out new infrastructure in Asia-Pac, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

The blade market was up 26.9% and shipments grew 6.2%. Counting x86, Itanium and RISC blades, manufacturers saw $2 billion in revenues, representing 15.2% of server market revenue. However, nearly 89% of all blade revenue was in x86-based blades, which now represent 21.2% of all x86 server revenue, more than even before.

HP maintained its number one spot in the server blade market with 51.9% revenue share, while IBM finished with 19.1%. Cisco and Dell represented 10% and 8.2% factory revenue share, respectively. IDC said all major vendors experienced double-digit growth in their blade business.

Demand for x86 servers, still the major play, saw 15.1% growth to $8.4 billion worldwide as unit shipments increased 5.4% to 1.9 million servers.

HP led the market with 38.1% revenue share based on 14.4% growth. Dell held second place, securing 21.7% revenue share, while IBM now owns 16.1% of the revenue share.

IDC said average selling prices (ASPs) are swinging up as average system configurations continue to move up-market because of the trend to consolidate more workloads on to servers that are configured with increased memory attach rates and higher-priced processors to provide systems capable of improving performance and efficiency.