Server sales paused as IT waits for quads

SERVER BUYERS are holding off for quad-core processors and mainframes are back in business, according to the latest data from Gartner.

"The fourth quarter of the year exhibited slower growth in x86 servers than we have seen in most recent years,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner in a press release. “Most of that slowdown seems to be attributable to a lengthening of the sales cycle due to the anticipated introduction of quad-core x86 processors with some lesser impact from x86 server virtualisation.”

Still, server sales generally are pretty solid with global shipments in 2006 up 8.9 percent to 8.2 million units in 2006. However, revenue growth is not nearly so strong, up just two percent over 2005 to $52.7bn.

Gartner added that “RISC-Itanium Unix” servers fell 1.6 per cent in volumes and 0.8 per cent in revenue but donisaurs still roam the earth and are even growing their domain - mainframes outpaced other server categories in revenue terms, leaping up 3.9 per cent over 2005.

The vendor league table based on revenue sees IBM still number one, ahead of HP, Sun, Dell and Fujistu Siemens. Sun was the star of the big vendors, posting its first revenue share growth since 2001, but the real talking horse may be Rackable Systems, up 68 per cent on shipments for 2006. µ