Server sales drop 25 percent worldwide
Worldwide server sales suffered a 25 percent drop in the first quarter, hitting their lowest level in at least 12 years, according to a new report from market tracker IDC.
The report, released Thursday, recorded first-quarter factory server sales at $9.9 billion, a drop of exactly 24.5 percent over the same period a year ago--and the lowest level since IDC began covering the market a dozen years ago.
The number of servers shipped fell 26.5 percent from the year-ago quarter, the smallest quarterly figure in the last five years.
IDC breaks the server market into three segments--volume servers (priced under $25,000), midrange ($25,000 to $499,999), and high-end enterprise ($500,000 or more). For the first time since 2002, all three segments saw lower revenue.
The low end of the market suffered the most, with quarterly sales sinking 30.5 percent year over year. Revenue in the midrange market slipped 13.6 percent, while high-end sales fell 19.5 percent.
"Market conditions worsened in all geographic regions during the first quarter as customers of all types pulled back on both new strategic IT projects and ongoing infrastructure refresh initiatives," Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC, said in a statement.
Among the top five server vendors profiled, Dell was hit hardest, with quarterly server revenue tumbling 31.2 percent. Hewlett-Packard showed a 26.2 percent decline. Sun Microsystems watched its revenue dive 25.5 percent. IBM saw its sales drop 19.9 percent. Sales at Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens fell 18.8 percent.
IBM and HP are the top server vendors, with each owning 29.3 percent of the server market.
On an optimistic note, Eastwood did predict a slight turnaround later this year.
"Most enterprise organizations are deferring new IT procurements and instead focusing on extending server lifecycles and improving existing asset utilization," he said. "IDC believes that while these strategies are effective in the near term, server demand will begin to improve in the second half of the year as customers begin to rebuild their IT capabilities in advance of a meaningful economic recovery in 2010."
(Credit:
IDC)
Lance Whitney wears a few different technology hats--journalist, Web developer, and software trainer. He's a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. You can follow Lance on Twitter at @lancewhit. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET. 
1) Let's see, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V (Win2k8)
2) IT People bought Win2k8 Server
3) IT People get *AT LEAST* 1 virtual license with Standard, Unlimited with Enterprise
4) IT People started using Hyper-V and the 1 or more virtual licenses for 2+ servers.
- and most likely using existing servers that can task it.
Conclusion: Gee, server sales are down.
Conclusion 2: DUH!
2) "IT People" get Win2k8 for free if they use EA/SA licensing, and you do have to park it on something (esp. since Win2k8 with the GUI does eat more resources than Win2k3 Server does).
3) A virtual license is worthless by itself.
4) Hyper-V is worthless in a production environment, as stated in #1. The big reasons why are easily enumerated:
* you can only get 10 Hyper-V instances maximum running on a single server of any size (as per Microsoft BPA/recommendation), whereas you can run up to 40 or more on a single VMWare ESX isntall, depending on hardware (e.g. I can comfortably run 34 VMWare virtual server machines on a single Dell R900 w/ 64GB of RAM before resource usage pops 60%, and in extreme cases I can probably do up to 50 before it bogged down too much).
* you're stuck with 24 Hyper-V instances on a single cluster (due to that gawdawful stupid disk lettering requirement of all things), whereas VMWare lets you run hundreds, even thousands (the latter applying to VDI) on a given cluster.
* Two words about Hyper-V that kills it instantly from consideration in the Enterprise: No VMotion (though Microsoft did say it was coming... eventually.)
* It's usually chained to the gawdawful pricey Citrix (a world-class resource hog in its own right).
We could go on, but really... you get the idea.
- by dennisl59 June 5, 2009 8:05 AM PDT
- Dell is getting crushed because of their Terrible, Horrible and Awful Enterprise Technical Support.
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