Server shipments up in Asia-Pacific

In the first quarter of 2010, shipments of servers in the Asia-Pacific region grew 27.3% year-on-year to reach 371 060 units, according to Gartner, states CENS.com.

The research firm says vendor revenue was up 8.8% year-on-year, generating $1.76 billion.

Server revenue recorded growth across Gartner's five sub-regions in Asia-Pacific, with Australia and New Zealand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations leading the pack with increases of 36.4% and 17.6%, respectively, during the quarter.

Microsoft is readying the first public beta version of its latest Web server, known as IIS Express, reports ZDNet.

Microsoft corporate vice-president of the .Net Developer platform, Scott Guthrie, says the IIS Express server will be lightweight (less than 10MB download) and quick to install.

Microsoft also plans to release a patch for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express later this year that will enable developers to automatically use IIS Express in place of the built-in ASP.Net Developer Server.

AMD's latest server processors (Opteron 4000 series) aim to reduce the power consumption in data centres by 24% compared to previous generation server processors, says Forbes.com.

Priced as low as $99 a chip, 28% lower than the least expensive Intel server processors, these AMD processors are speculated to appeal to cloud service providers and corporate data centres.

AMD has gained about 18 percentage points of market share since 2005, primarily at the expense of its rival Intel. It's forecasted that AMD's share in the global server market will remain flat in 2010 at around 30%.