Server sales on the up

SERVER SALES appear to be increasing even if the revenue that outfits earn from them is decreasing.

According to figures produced by Gartner, server shipments increased in the fourth quarter of 2009 but revenue fell as x86 servers continued to bite into the declining market for Unix servers using RISC and Itanium chips.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner said that the fourth quarter of 2008 was quite weak, so the fourth quarter of 2009 did not have to produce huge x86 server numbers to result in an increase.

But segments like RISC and Itanium Unix as well as mainframes remained constrained, and that hurt revenues, Hewitt said.

IBM was the top server vendor during the fourth quarter, with sales of $4.1 billion, a drop of 5.9 per cent year over year with a 32.7 per cent market share. Hewlett-Packard was close behind with sales of $3.95 billion, recording a small growth of 0.4 per cent. Dell's sales grew by 8.3 per cent to $1.5 billion, putting it in third place. Sun Microsystems, which has since been acquired by Oracle, saw a massive 23.5 per cent drop in server sales, which should mean it is crying in its beer at the moment.

HP did better in the x86 server market with sales of $2.8 billion. Dell came second there and IBM was in third. µ