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 6% 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% year over year. Meanwhile, growth of midrange enterprise servers (priced between $25,000 and $499,000) was less than 1%, and high-end enterprise servers (costing more than $500,000) showed an almost 2% increase.
IBM led the server market with a 31% revenue share, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co. with a market share of more than 28%. 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% of all server revenue in the second quarter.
Sun's server revenue grew almost 6% year over year; the company is the No. 3 player with 13% of the market. Dell, which showed more than a 20% revenue growth in x86 servers, followed Sun.
On the operating system front, Linux servers represented almost 14% of server revenue. Microsoft Windows accounted for 38% of server revenue, and Unix system revenue tallied in at 32% of the market.
In x86-based servers, HP led the market with a share of more than 35%, followed by Dell with more than 22% and IBM with 17.5%.
The blade server market also soared, with revenue growing 37% year over year. Blade servers accounted for $875 million, or 6.5% of the server market. HP held more than 47% of the blade server market, followed by IBM with 32%.
This story, "Server market grows after years of stagnant sales" was originally published by Network World.