Server market accelerates

Factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 6.4% year-over-year to $13.9 billion in the second quarter of 2008, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, says Market Watch.

This is the ninth consecutive quarter of positive revenue growth and the highest Q2 server revenue since 2000.

Jean Bozman, research VP in the Enterprise Platforms Group, says: "The growth in mid-range and high-end servers this quarter shows that customers still see value in leveraging these scalable servers, with built-in high availability and RAS features, for some of their most mission-critical workloads and for workload consolidation."

Dell's server revenue climbed by 15% over the second quarter of last year, compared with 11.5% growth for IBM and 3% growth for HP, reports Computer World.

Dell made the most of an upswing in x86 server replacements during the quarter, which was the biggest driver for the market as a whole, and sales were increased by data centre build-outs and growth in emerging markets.

Overall, the vendors sold 2.3 million servers during the quarter, up 12% from the same period in 2006.

Information infrastructure solutions provider EMC Corporation announced its new EMC Celerra NX4 unified storage system that consolidates network attached storage (NAS), iSCSI and fibre channel storage area network (SAN) in a single multi-protocol system, states Info Tech.

It is ideally suited for small to medium businesses and remote offices which are aiming to consolidate their distributed file servers and storage onto a single, easy to use platform.

"EMC's entry-level Celerra NX4 builds on the notable success of the Celerra NS20 and NS40 unified storage systems, helping customers control costs and consolidate distributed server and storage resources while assuring enterprise-class reliability and data protection," said Charles King, analyst at Pund-IT.