Global server market revenue has increased by 2.5% during the second quarter of 2014, with its shipments reaching 2.2 million units, which were mainly driven by investments in large scale data centre capacity, latest IDC report reveals.
With the signs of a server refresh cycle continue to boost the market in coming days, volume systems reported fifth consecutive quarter growth in demand and reported 4.9% revenue rise.
IDC Enterprise Platforms group vice president and general manager Matt Eastwood said: "The server market is experiencing the beginning of a cyclical refresh cycle as systems deployed shortly after the financial crisis are retired and replaced.
"IDC expects this refresh cycle will continue well into 2015 and be further accelerated by Microsoft’s announcement that it is ending support for Windows Server 2003 coupled with Intel’s forthcoming release of the Grantley Xeon EP and a significant number of related server platform announcements.
"At the same time, IDC is also seeing early stage enterprise investment in 3rd Platform workloads that leverage Webscale architectures typically seen in hyperscale environments.
"These workloads will drive additional interest in software-defined environments that will further enhance the need for servers deployed as the infrastructure underpinning these next generation datacenters."
Midrange systems were also impacted by the technology refresh cycles, arket for these systems to grow by 11.6%, while the high-end enterprise systems reported 9.8% revenue drop in Q2.
HP topped the list of vendors with 25.4% market share, followed by IBM (23.6%), Dell (16.6%), Oracle (5.9%) and Cisco (5.8%) in Q2.
IDC Enterprise Servers research manager Kuba Stolarski said: "Demand for servers in the public cloud continues to be a major driving force for server market growth.
"While many of the largest of these companies have already undergone periodic datacenter expansions over the past year, public cloud demand for new servers will continue to outpace the general market in the immediate future.
"As these customers search for new ways to maximize datacenter efficiency, their technological choices may help accelerate emerging trends in low power and alternative server architectures."
During the quarter, x86 servers reported 7.8% revenue growth; non-x86 servers experienced 12.8% revenue drop; blade servers reported 7% increase; while the revenues generated by density-optimized servers declined by 7.6%.
Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Western Europe reported highest server revenue growth regionally with respective rises of 6.9% and 6%.
IDC Enterprise Servers and Datacenter research director Jed Scaramella said: "Modular servers – blades and density-optimized – represent distinct segments of growth for vendors in an otherwise mature market.
"As the building block for integrated systems, blade servers will continue to drive enterprise customers along the evolutionary path toward private clouds.
"On the opposite side of the spectrum, density-optimized servers are being rapidly adopted by hyperscale datacentres that favor the scalability and efficiency of the form factor."
