The server market got a first opinion about its health from Gartner earlier this week, and now, IDC dons the white coat and snaps on the rubber gloves to give the third quarter server racket a full checkup and a second opinion. By IDC's count, server peddlers moved $11.81bn in machinery in the third quarter, a 13.2 per cent …

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Thursday 2nd December 2010 09:36 GMT sola

Not surprising that IDC doesn't want to share Linux system numbers

"Linux server revenues rose by 32.6 per cent to $2.1bn; IDC did not return a call at press time to get a figure for Linux server shipment growth in the quarter."

This is bloody ridiculous.

Obviously, those unit numbers would be VERY unfavourable to Microsoft so they (IDC) simply don't include them.

The revenue numbers are somewhat comparable so that could remain in the "research paper".

This is a clear sign that Linux is CONQUERING the server market at a high rate and Microsoft is falling behind so they are paying to market research companies to try to make this less obvious.

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1. Thursday 2nd December 2010 10:13 GMT Matt Bryant
  
  RE: Not surprising that IDC doesn't want to share Linux system numbers
  
  "......This is bloody ridiculous....." Are you by chance referring to what follows in your post?
  
  ".....Obviously, those unit numbers would be VERY unfavourable to Microsoft so they (IDC) simply don't include them....." Actually, it's because many servers that go out with Windoze pre-installed get re-installed with Linux (which means they would be counted as Windoze instead of Linux in factory figures), so IDC is actually stopping the M$ figures looking better than they are by not splitting it out on factory figures. There's also the large number of servers that go out with no OS as they are going to be loaded with VMware or other virtualisation products, so there is no real way to accurately guesstimate how many will be hosting Windoze images and how many will be running Linux ones unless licences are bought at the same time (and if a virtualised server is running both, do you count it as both a Linux one and as a Windoze one?).
  
  So, please put your copy of "Conspiricy Theories for Dummies" away, chillax and stop seeing enemies in every corner.
  
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Thursday 2nd December 2010 09:45 GMT Matt Bryant

Will Larry blink?

So, the "others" category of server vendors did grow their revs but Oracle's - despite all Larry's marketting bluster and theatrics - barely budged. You have to wonder how long will Larry keep putting money into the old Sun server biz for such poor returns compared to the software side, especially as it doesn't seem to be pulling through any additional software sales over what the company could do without the hardware albatross.

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1. Friday 3rd December 2010 10:10 GMT Matt Bryant
  
  .... but.....
  
  After a technical team meeting (AKA an evening down the pub), the resident Sunshiner has asked me to point out two small points (at least I think these were his points, it all got a bit fuzzy towards then end of the meeting):
  
  1/ "The new Snoreacle T3 kit was only announced in September, so it's a bit early to be writing it off." I would agree but suggest that unless Larry's T3 kit shows the same ramp up as hp's Tukzilla kit and IBM's Pee7 then it will probably be the last generic SPARC server kit from Snoreacle, anything following on will be niche storage "appliances" that use SPARC cores. Despite arriving in the middle-to-tail-end of the recession, both Tukzilla and Pee7 seem to be doing quite well. Larry's new T3 has arrived after the recession and so has an easier launch, so any failure to ramp is going to be terminal.
  
  2/ As all but one of the current Tukzilla servers are blades-based, hp can count them twice in IDC figures, being able to count them once as UNIX servers and then again count them towards the blades figure as well." True, but then IBM also has the same option with their Pee7 blades, it's just their UNIX blades are pants compared to their UNIX rack servers, so hp will be laughing all the way to the bank on that one. Meanwhile, the actual number of Itanium blades to x64 is probably so low as to make little difference to the number of units, they're still outselling IBM on x64 blades by a considerable margin.
  
  Discuss!
  
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Thursday 2nd December 2010 10:11 GMT Richard Lloyd

What about servers shipped with no OS?

Although the article briefly mentions that - shock, horror - servers can actually be bought without an OS, how come there's no figures from IDC for such servers? If you think about it, most server deals that come with an OS (usually Windows) offer a discount on the server+OS combo compared to buying them separately. Hence, anyone who buys a server without an OS is either going to be a pirate (unlikely in the server room) or be putting on a free OS (since a paid OS would cost more than the combo deal version).

Since the most popular free OS on servers is Linux, we can therefore deduce that the vast majority of OS-less servers will be running Linux. I bet that adding those OS-less servers to the paid Linux servers would close the gap considerably to Windows, but without any IDC figures (or did they quote them and the article ignored them?), we can't do the maths on this.

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