World server market rebounds

BEANCOUNTERS AT IDC have decided that the world server market has officially rebounded from the doom and gloom of earlier in the year.

In its latest report IDC says that after hitting bottom in the second quarter, the worldwide server market began to rebound in the third quarter.

Intel's release of its Nehalem EP processor and AMD's new Istanbul Opteron chip helped fuel the recovery in the x86 server space.

In the third quarter the server market began to stabilise and promises to continue to rebound in the fourth quarter and into next year.

While global server revenue and shipments declined 17.3 per cent and 17.9 per cent, respectively, over the third quarter in 2008, both grew significantly over the second quarter of this year.

IDC's findings mirror those of that other analyst outfit Gartner, which released its quarterly server numbers.

The x86 server market got a lot more excited when Chipzilla released its quad-core Nehalem EP Xeon processor for systems with two sockets in March. That release was soon followed by Advanced Micro Devices' release of its six-core Istanbul - not Constantinople - Opteron chip.

While enterprises restricted spending on new data centre hardware, the new processors offered savings in terms of performance and virtualization capabilities. Many outfits also believed Intel's claims that Nehalem offered businesses a return on investment of less than a year, IDC said.

Blade servers also showed strong growth, with revenue increasing 1.2 per cent year over year, though shipments dropped 14 per cent. This was thanks to Intel's release of its Nehalem EP Xeon 5500 Series chips. µ