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Gartner: Linux Servers Booming
Tarantolato writes "According to a recent Gartner report, low-end Linux server shipments grew significantly in the first quarter of 2004. Part of this may be due to the comeback of the relational database market in 2003, where Linux growth was especially strong, while Windows growth was weaker. There is mixed news for Sun, who saw growing shipments but declining revenues in Q1 of 2004."
I swear every quarter I hear this same news story.
From 2001
http://librenix.com/?inode=984
The report shows Linux server revenue rising from 2,422,266,299 in 2001 to 9,142,634,360 in 2005 and total units rising from 543,778 to 2,610,235 over the same period.
End-user research done in 2000 presents a good picture of the real market share of Linux as a server operating system and serves to project the probable market share for Linux this year, as well as a Linux server forecast through 2005.
nice to see it's growing, zeitgeist still shows a pitiful 1% though :(
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Actually, Oracle is OS agnostic. They run everywhere (bah, mostly. Win, Linux, Hp Ux, Solaris, and a big etcetera).
They do pitch linux a lot lately.
It also means little if servers are being shipped with XP or even no OS, and being loaded with Debian after delivery.
I know in the past when ordering servers from Dell even though we order them with no operating system preinstalled the sales rep would ask what OS we were going to be using, presumably to gather just that sort of information. As for stripping windows and installing a Linux distribution, how often does this really happen on server hardware? On desktops, sure, but on a server? It's highly unlikely any serious hardware could even be ordered with a non-server version of windows, and if you're footing the bill for that, chances are it's not so you can just toss it and do a reformat as soon as the machine arrives.
It looks like the total Linux based DB market of $300M was just slightly bigger than the increase in MS based market (3% of 7.1b = $222m) Big percentage changes, but different market shares to start...
There's a much more detailed summary of the Gartner report up at com.com. The overall numbers are thus:
Total WW Q1 server revenue: $11.81 billion, +9.3% quarter-on-quarter*
That breaks down into:
Windows: $4.13 billion, +19.5%
Proprietary Unix: $4.02 billion, -2%
Mainframe: $1.7 billion, +12%
Linux: $1.02 billion, +57.3%
That leaves $.94 billion unaccounted for; I was thinking this chunk could be VMS and NSK revenues, but that makes it difficult to fit HP's 32.5% share of x86 revenues into the $.94 billion left over when you subtract it plus HP's $1.17 billion in proprietary Unix sales from HP's $3.07 billion total sales. (And that's ignoring HP's Q1 IA64 sales, which were very substantial.)
Of course all these questions are surely answered in the report itself, but I'm not gonna pay 95 bucks to find out.
*How do I know the figures in the com.com article are QoQ and not YoY? Because the Gartner summary (linked above) puts overall YoY revenue growth at 24.1%, not the 9.3% reported in the article. Which makes both the 57.3% Linux growth and the 12.5% Sun decline even more stunning.
From IDC's 2002 stats from last fall, there was 1 (23.1%) PAID Linux server for every 2 (55.1%)Windows Servers sold.m l.
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5088233.ht
This does not include the Linux servers created from free downloads.
With the massive increase of Linux servers, what is the ratio between Windows Server against PAID Linux server.
RTFM. Linux _grew_ by $180million dollars compared to $100million for MS. Those look like actual numbers to me.
$900 million in quarterly sales is not exactly low volume. I'm not sure how much of the revenue is mainframe based (they also had a good quarter due to a hardware refresh by IBM. Unit numbers are not disclosed in the press releases (you gotta pay for the details) but unit growth was just behind revenue growth, which is backward from other markets where prices usually decline, they've been ramping for several quarters in linux servers. I think windows servers (or perhaps the whole x86 market is about $4 billion/quarter.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I created myself a linux job by selling linux and openbsd solutions to one of my customers. Linux do a great job replacing aging and worm ridden NT servers.
Furthermore, when you search linux on yahoo hotjobs , you will find thousands of linux jobs. In Québec, were i live, linux jobs are also available.
When they say things like this, they usually mean "relative to the first quarter of last year." So if all four quarters show a 50% rate of growth, the growth rate for the year would be 50%, not over 400% (1.5^4-1). They do things this way because the season can make a big difference in puchases, and so they don't want to muddle things by comparing different months or different quarters. The same thing happens for big tetail chains (Walgreens generally reports sales growth on the order of 14% each month, but they mean relative to the same month last year, not the month immediately prior).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
RTFA. Says there, 1.57 million units sold.
At my university where I work in the IT department, if you would suggest a Windows server for anything today they'd have your head examined. Linux has become the defacto web and database server around here. It's not just that it's cheaper, it's better and you don't have to manage licenses which is a huge deal in a place like this where we can barely keep track of all the new machines that are constantly coming in.
I'm also very happy to see that when we place the order for personal computers for post graduate students, about 1 in 5 actually specifically requests a Linux workstation these days. That would have been unheard of just a few years ago.
According to an article at Tekrati Industry Analyst Reporter tonight, IDC is saying Linux Server sales grew revenue at 56.9% and unit shipments at 46.4%. Also, they have a report stating Linux servers near the $1 billion mark in quarterly revenue. You can get to the IDC release off the Tekrati article or go to IDC directly.
Depending on whose numbers you are going to believe, Linux already holds about 30% to 50% of the market, strangely the Linux share is always higher in areas where the numbers are not guessed but counted like in webservers where Apache/Linux holds a comfortable majority.
Have you ever searched a webhoster in Germany that even offers Windows? Mine stopped to offer it last year. Windows is dying there, and losing more and more:
look here
In Japan, the same picture:
stats
In a lot of countries, Windows on servers is already an exotic niche platform.
Webhosters don't want it anymore because the support costs aren't worth it and the added risk (a worm was the reason my webhoster stopped offering Windows) has to be paid somehow. Customers don't want it anymore because Apache gives them a much larger palette of availabe webhosters - thus more choice, lower costs and more competition among webhosters.
Windows just offers no real advantages to make up for all the license hassles.
I don't know about you guys but I have two huge HP boxes that do a ton of stuff. These two clustered servers serve up 150 desktops, handle the company email, order entry processing, mysql database, postgres database, plone server, internal intranet, file serving.
Try doing that much stuff with two windows boxes. A windows installation rarely runs more than a single application.
What you really need to ask is what is the potential of those linux boxes that are shipped
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