Bladewatch.com

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080523/152232/

Worldwide server shipments for the first quarter of 2008 increased 7.6% over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period climbed 4.3%, according to Gartner Inc. Worldwide server revenues totaled US$13.6 billion for the quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached just under 2.3 million units.

“There were a number of dynamics that affected the market to produce an initial quarter of growth for 2008,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “For example, x86 server replacements were on an upswing as the year commenced; we continued to see build outs of large Web datacenters, and emerging-market growth forged ahead.”

“RISC-Itanium Unix servers fell in shipments but showed a small amount of growth in revenue,” Hewitt said. “In this segment, shipments fell 8.4% while revenue grew 3.7% for the quarter.”

HP and IBM continue to vie for market leadership in the worldwide server market based on revenue. HP took the overall revenue share lead over IBM by a narrow 0.7% for the quarter. HP had increases in both its ProLiant and HP Integrity brands which offset some revenue declines in its other brands. This produced a year-to-year revenue increase of 10.3% for the period and pushed HP’s share up 1.6%. HP also increased its worldwide blade server revenue share to just over 13% compared to the same quarter last year.

It’s interesting to see that server shipments continued to increase in the first quarter of 2008. There have been comments from colleagues that server sales might fall due to the effect of the ‘credit crunch’, companies seeking to reduce expenditure on IT.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this, you’ll tend to find that there will be a switch to spending money on infrastructure that can provide a higher return on investment, as well as those business essential activities. I might stop buying new web servers and upgrade the memory in them instead, but if my data center is getting full, it’s cheaper to start looking at virtualization, to consider a hardware refresh and consolidation project than to kick of a project to look at upgrading or buying more data center space.  Related to this is the range of new operating systems and solutions that are coming online, with Windows 2008 coming on stream, new virtualization and open source solutions, you might find that deploying these tools requires a new server, I can run Windows 2008 on my DL360G2, but if I want the functionality, the business benefit, the chances are that I’ll want a newer server to provide these functionality improvements and performance/capacity.

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