IBM outpaces server rivals
Total industry revenue from non-x86 servers, including Unix and mainframe systems, jumped 12.3%, compared to a 10.1% increase in revenue from sales of servers that run Windows or Linux on industry-standard chips, according to numbers released Wednesday by market watcher IDC.
IBM's quarterly server revenues came in at $3.5 billion, making it the number two player in sales behind Hewlett-Packard (HP). But IBM's server business is growing faster than that of its Palo Alto-based rival, which saw 10.8% growth.
Blade servers accounted for about a fifth of all x64-based server revenues, and across all processor architectures (there are RISC and Itanium blades, but not mainframe blades), those blade servers brought their makers $1.8 billion in sales, says The Register.
Blade-server revenues grew twice as fast as the market at large, up 23.8%, and shipments rose 5.4% in Q1 2011.
HP got half that blade money, IBM a fifth, and Cisco Systems and Dell pulled in 9.4% and 8.4% of blade sales in Q1, respectively.
However, reveals eWeek, new to the rankings is Cisco Systems, the networking giant that two years ago unveiled the first versions of its converged data centre offerings, the UCS, or Unified Computing System.
The solution offers a tightly integrated package of compute, storage, networking, virtualisation and systems management software.
Now the company is finding its way onto IDC's quarterly server report, with the first quarter being the first time the market research firm tracked Cisco's numbers.
According to IDC, Cisco captured 1.6% of the overall server market based on revenue, finishing seventh, nestled between NEC and Hitachi, according to Jed Scaramella, research manager for enterprise servers at IDC.
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