Market research firm IDC said that factory revenues for servers worldwide grew 6.4 percent to amount to $13.9 billion in the second quarter of this year.

IDC said this is the ninth consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with blade systems, Unix systems and Big Blue System z continuing to grow.
IBM, in fact, held onto the server pole position, with 33.2% market share, growing 13.8% year on year. HP held onto number two position with 27.4% share, while Dell had 14.1% of the market, and Sun fourth. However, Sun's share declined by 7.2% year on year. 

While Linux servers grew at 10%, Windows server revenue only grew by 1.7% - however, Microsoft is the single largest operating system in the server space.

Indeed, X86 based servers had its slowest growth in 23 quarters, said IDC. It described the "pricing climate" as difficult, with ASPs declining by 8.4% year on year.  One and two CPU systems are now commodities. X