Server shipments log strong Q1 growth

Worldwide server shipments grew by 23 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2009, Gartner has reported.

The sales led to revenue increases of six per cent, but the analyst firm warned that there is still ground to make up after the boom year of 2008.

"We have seen a return to growth on a worldwide level, but the market has not yet returned to the historic quarterly highs posted in 2008, and there were some interesting variations in that growth," said Jeffrey Hewitt, a research vice president at Gartner.

"Emerging regions that were expected to grow, such as Asia-Pacific, forged ahead, while some mature markets, such as the US, produced better than expected results. But other countries and regions saw a 'mixed bag' of results."

Gartner said that x86-based server shipments grew by 25.3 percent, while RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined by 28.5 percent.

Mainframe sales fell by just over 15 percent.

Blade servers showed the strongest growth, seeing shipments increase by 23.7 percent and a revenue increase of 40.7 percent.

HP shipped the most servers and logged revenues of US$3.4bn, according to Gartner, giving the vendor just under a third of the server market.

HP's gain came at the expense of IBM, which saw its revenues decline by 2.1 percent.