Server shipments worldwide up 8% in Q2 2011

And Asia Pac grew the most in shipments with a 25.6% increase.

According to Gartner, Inc., worldwide server shipments in the second quarter of 2011 grew 8 percent year on year, while revenue moved upward 19.5 percent year on year.

"The second quarter produced solid growth on a yearly basis, as the recovery that started in 2010 continues to eke out slow improvements," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "All regions showed yearly growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, although in both measures the market is again below the pre-downturn levels we saw in the corresponding quarter of 2008."

"x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.4 percent in units for the quarter and 17.7 percent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined 8.5 percent in shipments but showed a revenue increase of 4.3 percent compared with the same quarter last year. The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a strong growth of 48.8 percent," Mr. Hewitt said.

From a geographic standpoint, the Asia Pacific region grew the most in shipments with a 25.6 percent increase. Japan posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 59.5 percent for the period.

All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the second quarter of 2011. HP continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue. The company posted over $3.9 billion in server vendor revenue, accounting for 29.8 percent of the server market based on revenue. This share was down 2.2 percent year on year.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the second quarter of 2011 with a year-on-year shipment increase of 11.7 percent. This growth was driven by increases in HP's ProLiant brand. HP's worldwide server shipment share was 30.8 percent, representing a 1.0 percent increase in share from the same quarter in 2010.

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, all but Dell posted increases in units for the second quarter of 2011.

In terms of x86-based server form factors, blade servers rose 8.2 percent in shipments and 29.5 percent in revenues for the quarter. The rack-optimized form factor climbed 8.9 percent in shipments and 17 percent in revenue for the second quarter of 2011.