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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."
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.
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
nice to see it's growing, zeitgeist [google.com] still shows a pitiful 1% though
On the other hand, the Netcraft Web Server Survey shows 67% of the machines running Apache, and most of them run Linux or FreeBSD
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.