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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."
To say linux server sales are up 27% means little if the volume is low.
If I sold one last year, and three this year then I can talk about 300% growth, but that number is meaningless.
Yeah, linux is gaining ground, but has a long way to go.
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According to Gartner, revenue of Linux-based server hardware rose 57.3 percent over the first quarter, while commercial Unix server revenue fell 2.3 percent.
Is it just me or does 57.3 percent growth genuinely impress you as well? I can only assume the article contains a mistake since it claims 57.3 percent revenue growth for linux-based servers over the first quarter which means "in three months". This strikes me as unlikely, unless Linux is actually destroying everything in its path. Shouldn't this read year over year in which case the 57.3 percent growth happened in 12 months, not 3. Can anyone confirm for sure? Regardless this is fantastic news, it's been a many, many years since we've seen genuine competition in the OS market.
This isn't Linux versus Windows -- it's SQL Server versus Oracle. Shops are choosing Oracle and then choosing Linux as the platform (given that it's largely irrelevant what platform it runs on). The submission implies that it was a toss up between Windows and Linux, and after choosing Linux they started looking around for a RDBMS.
Copyrights have nothing to do with free market property rights, but are rather like government regulations about what people can do with information. But the GPL, has found a 'loophole' in these restrictions - and is far more accountable to free market forces. People who have closed software are going to continue to pay huge opportunity costs as the market takes off again.
I think the parent makes a valid point, double figure percentage increases in the server market mean little when your OS counts for a mere fraction of the desktop market. You may try and modbomb this away, but in the end Slashdot is not the world, googles zeitgeist however, is.
Linux still has a mountain or seven to climb
thats desktop, not server. More importantly that number cannot be accurate since just about every method of checking that can be modified. (and in many cases it is)
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I wonder what they qualify as a 'Low End Server'? Only uniprocessor? Quad Xeon with an ultra320 hardware RAID? Any x86 Linux box?
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They were initially purchased to run Windows apps. When the Windows servers were upgraded, I grabbed these two and put Linux on them.
So, four sales for Windows (two initial servers and the two replacement servers)
-and-
No sales for Linux
-but-
Actual deployment is 2 servers for Windows and 2 for Linux.
(That isn't 50% of our servers. We have almost 20 Windows servers because the apps don't play well with each other.) I expect there are a lot more installations like mine out there. The sales percentages (particularly the $$$) will not tell you the real picture.
If you had read the article, Linux isnt kicking MS in the slightest. MS sales were UP, and their market share stayed the same.
Linux market share increased, but certainly not at the expense of MS.
I have 5 computers running (or almost running) at the moment. Only two of them ever visit websites / use google. Oh, and I'm not a business. All of these machines are for my entertainment and/or utility. If I understand the zeitgeist correctly, those computers don't exist. Or, more simply - who surfs the web on a headless database server?
Sometime last year I set up a linux snort server at work. Certainly a low-end server, by most standards. Did Gartner take this into account? I certainly didn't tell them, and I doubt they monitored me as I downloaded the iso's.
If gartner's stats are strictly based on data from redhat, IBM, etc, how can they possibly account for all of the "other" installs? I certainly hope these stats won't be used to calculate market share...
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If I sold one last year, and three this year then I can talk about 300% growth, but that number is meaningless.
What makes that number particularly meaningless is that that would actually be 200% growth.
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Skipping the Linux v. Windows v. Sun debates. The main gist of the article is that there are more servers being thrown up at a significantly less cost.
You've obviously never seen how much it costs to purchase an Oracle license...