The server market news: x86 is still growing, mainframes are falling harshly

Gartner unveiled the state of the global server market in the second quarter. According to their information, serve`s supply will reached 2.8 million units, which is 2.4% more compared to the same period of 2016. The revenue grew up to 2.8% which is almost $ 14 billion. Dell EMC was the market leader in terms of quantity - it managed to deliver 493 thousand servers (17.5% of the market) over the period. The second place was is held by HPE - it delivered 483 thousand servers (17.1%). In the third and fourth places, with a noticeable lag there are Huawei and Inspur - 176 thousand (6.2%) and 158 thousand (5.6%) respectively.

Lenovo part dropped significantly: in the II quarter, it managed to sell 146 thousand servers, while a year before it sold 235 thousand machines. Accordingly, its share decreased from 8.5 to 5.2%. Other suppliers entered the category "others". They accounted for 48.4% of the market, and the total number of servers delivered by suppliers from this category reached 1.37 million.

It also follows from the Gartner report that HPE, having earned $ 3.2 billion, retained revenue leadership in the server market with a share of 23%. It is followed by Dell EMC with 2.8 billion dollars (19.9%). IBM was in third place: $ 963 million (6.9%). Cisco took 6.2% of the market, gaining $ 867 million. Huawei, which was on the fifth position, earned 846 million dollars (6.1%).

So what has resulted the growth?

Experts named two factors, which, in their opinion, contributed to the rise of the server market. First, strong sales of equipment in the Asia-Pacific region were affected by the construction of data centers (mainly in China). The second reason is the expansion of existing hyper-scalable data centers (for example, those owned by Facebook and Google), which primarily helped ODM-producers.

The x86 processor architecture remains the dominant server platform used in large data centers around the world. Deliveries of x86 servers in the second quarter increased by 2.5% in quantitative terms and by 6.9% in monetary terms. The growing demand for integrated systems, the market share of which, however, remains small, also stimulated sales of x86-systems, reports Gartner. Meanwhile, server shipments on the RISC / Itanium Unix architecture decreased by 21.4%. The mainframes showed a significant decline - their manufacturers earned 29.5% less than a year earlier.