Blades sharpen up server market

Factory revenues in the worldwide server market grew 6.3 per cent year over year to $13.1bn in the second quarter of 2007 led by strong demand for blades and x86 systems, new research reveals.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker reported that this is the fifth consecutive quarter of positive revenue growth and the highest second-quarter revenue since the market peaked in 2000.

After three years of slowing growth, server shipments grew 6.1 per cent year over year in the second quarter of 2007 driven by an improved refresh cycle and an expansion of new distributed computing workload deployments across the market.

The research reveals that volume x86 systems represented the "primary driver " for market growth during the quarter as revenue growth improved to 11 per cent year over year.

In contrast, revenue for midrange enterprise servers increased 0.2 per cent year over year and the high-end enterprise server market showed a 1.7 per cent increase year over year.

"The server market continues to experience solid growth, and revenue growth has accelerated over the past seven quarters," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC.

"Although x86-based systems are once again the primary driver for overall market growth, continued growth in other market segments demonstrates that a single standardised infrastructure is not capable of meeting the full range of needs in today's modern enterprise.

"Enterprise customers of all types continue to focus on driving business growth. This growth drives new computing demands, which increasingly require both scale-up consolidated systems and scale-out distributed configurations to meet very different workload needs in today's enterprise."

The server blade market showed signs of acceleration for the third consecutive quarter, as factory revenues grew 36.7 per cent year over year.

Overall, blade servers, including x86, Epic and Risc blades, accounted for $875m in the second quarter, representing 6.7 per cent of quarterly server market revenue.

"Blade servers continue to be the fastest growing segment of the worldwide server market," said Jed Scaramella, research analyst in IDC's Enterprise Computing group.

"Customers are increasing their blade deployments and vendors are broadening the blades product portfolio.

"IDC believes that blades are in the next wave of product evolution and customer adoption.

"As IT organisations become more familiar with the platform, they are able to deploy blades in IT environments that are suited to take advantage of the management capabilities, as well as the cost and serviceability benefits."