Gartner and IDC's latest fourth quarter server sales reports paint an interesting picture: While overall server sales are up sharply, our UNIX and midrange servers have been treading water with little growth. Still, according to the research firms, IBM managed make impressive UNIX market share gains over HP and Oracle/Sun.

Overall, Gartner reports worldwide server shipments grew 6.5 percent with revenue climbing 16.4 percent. IDC pegged shipment growth at 6.1 percent with 15.3 percent revenue growth. 

Both research firms pointed to strong x86 server sales due to a combination of the availability of refreshed x86 product lines along with replacement cycles in enterprises looking to upgrade older x86 servers that had been buzzing along in a holding pattern during the down economy.

"2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based server demand produce some significant growth on a worldwide level," notes Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "The introduction of new processors from Intel and AMD toward the end of 2009 helped fuel a pretty significant replacement cycle of servers that had been maintained in place during the economic downturn in 2009.

"Ongoing blade server growth and the introduction of 'skinless' servers in the x86 segment also helped push 2010 results into double-digit growth rates, despite ongoing constraints in RISC/Itanium Unix platforms. The introduction of new mainframe platforms from IBM helped to drive increases in the mainframe segment with 68.3 percent revenue growth of IBM's System Z platforms in the fourth quarter," Hewitt explained.

As for the System z action, IDC's Jean Bozman, research vice president of IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group, explains, "The marked increase in System z revenue that was seen in the fourth quarter reflects the deep investment that IBM made in reinventing its long-lived datacenter platform by closely linking it to a distributed-system blade chassis running POWER and x86 systems for workloads with mainframe affinity. Pent-up demand within the installed base, following high-end server declines in 2009 and 2010, was a key driver in the mainframe revenue increase, showing both the need for increased capacity and mainframe customer support of this approach to hybrid-systems computing."

The Battle of the Titans

IBM and HP have been duking it out for years over the right be king of the server mountain, and the fourth quarter was no exception: According to Gartner, IBM pulled in $5.2 billion in server revenue, giving it a 35.5 percent market share over HP's $4.5 billion and 30.4 percent market share. When it came to shipments, however, HP sold 767,000, followed by Dell's 515,000, and then trailed by IBM's 332,000. The real surprise, however, was Oracle's paltry 36,614 server shipments, which earned it a 40.8 percent decline in shipments and a 16.2 percent decline in revenue.

For the entire 2010 year, though, Gartner reports that HP squeaked out $15.3 billion in revenue vs. IBM's $15 billion.

Can Oracle or HP Take Some UNIX Blame?

The only area of the market that remained weak is the UNIX segment, Gartner reported, showing revenue decline 18.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. UNIX vendors are squeezed between new investments in x86 platforms and the entrenched but strong installed base of System Z. “The challenge for UNIX vendors in 2011 is to limit migrations and to try to encourage new investment in these platforms,” noted Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner.

“We also need to recognize that the market is still in a fairly tentative recovery mode,” he added. “Many companies are still in cost-containment mode and, although 2010 growth levels were strong, we’re still some way off the revenue highs that we saw in 2007.”

As for IBM, IDC reported that the company grew AIX-related server revenue by 12 percent for the fourth quarter while Gartner reported 9.9 percent UNIX revenue growth out of IBM.