Linux server shipments up one third as market tops $1bn

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 25 Nov 2004 at 12:17

Linux servers are now pulling in $1bn a quarter, according to the latest figures from IDC for the third quarter of this year.

With a 42.6 per cent growth rate in revenues and 31.7 per cent rise in unit shipments, servers shipped running Linux now carry 9.2 per cent of all server revenues.

The chip of choice for Linux is also very clear. 'Over 60 per cent of AMD's volumes are tied to Linux server deployments,' said John Humphreys, research manager of IDC's Global Enterprise Server Solutions. 'Opteron grew volumes greater than 400 per cent year over year.'

'Opteron is largely selling into corporate, government and industrial market segments with a need for high performance systems... Conversely, EM64T is shipping overwhelmingly with Windows and is being deployed largely in existing 32-bit environments.'

The lower-cost volume server market still represents the driving force in the global server market, with this sector increasing 18.2 per cent year on year compared with 5.5 per cent as a whole.

The volume x86 market took a chunk out of the mid-range sector to fuel its growth. This latter actually saw revenues fall over the quarter as businesses discover they can run the same workloads on volume products.

Microsoft too had much to celebrate. Its Windows platform showed revenues up 13.3 per cent and shipments up 19.1 per cent and accounted for a third of all revenues - on a par with the Unix market.

However, the volume sector didn't have it all its way. High-end servers too showed growth of 1.9 per cent and IT budgets expand both in size and areas of spend.

'IT spending remained strong overall in the third quarter as customers continued to refresh and expand their IT infrastructures,' said Matt Eastwood, program director of Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC. 'Although customers continue to target data center simplification initiatives, investment in strategic IT initiatives - including new workloads - are also growing significantly once again.'

Vendor-wise, IBM topped the list in slicing up revenues, taking 31.7 per cent, while HP was king of the hill for units shipped but second for revenues. Dell and Sun tied for the third spot with the former showing a 14 per cent growth, while Sun's revenues were flat at around 0.1 per cent year on year growth.