Server growth

Worldwide server shipments grew 27.1% year over year in Q2, while revenue climbed 14.3%, according to Gartner.

“As in the first quarter, the second quarter again demonstrated strong year-on-year growth,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research VP at Gartner. “There remained some regional variations, but all geographies demonstrated improving market conditions. However, x86-based servers grew 28.9% in units in the second quarter and 37% in revenues; RISC/Itanium Unix servers remained constrained, with declines of 16.5% in shipments and decreases of 8.8% in vendor revenues, compared to the same quarter last year; whilst the ‘other’ CPU category, primarily mainframes, fell 22.8% in revenues for the quarter.

From the regional standpoint, Eastern Europe grew the most significantly in server shipments, with a 46.9% increase in the second quarter of 2010, as well as the highest vendor revenue growth, at 26.2% for the period. All other regions had varying shipment and revenue increases.

HP led the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over $3.5 billion in server vendor revenue, accounting for 32% of worldwide server revenue for Q2/10. HP’s share was up 3.1% year-on-year. Of the top five global vendors, Dell, Fujitsu and HP all had revenue increases for the same period.

Blade servers had the strongest growth of any form factor, with an increase of 17.8% in units and 32.8% in vendor revenue for the Q1.