Global server market revenues dropped 2.5 percent year over year to $23.6 billion during the second quarter, according to the latest IDC figures.
IDC beancounters counted more than 3.2 million during the quarter which was an increase of 0.1 percent over the previous year. The analyst claimed volume server revenue was up 5.6 percent to nearly $20 billion.
However, the midrange and high-end server downturn had a knock-on effect for the overall market, with IDC publishing declines of 30 pe cent to $2.4 billion for the midrange and 32.7 percent to $1.3 billion for the high-end.
IDC said that server market performance was muted in the second quarter as the market shifted slightly towards single-socket server configurations.
IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies senior research analyst, Paul Maguranis said: “While servers purchased directly from ODMs declined year over year, some past backlog recovery within the hyperscale datacenter community contributed to a large jump in this segment when compared to the first quarter of this year.”
IDC data saw HPE and Dell in a tie for the top position in the worldwide server market. While HPE grew 3.4 percent, Dell had a growth of 10.2 percent.
Inspur/Inspur Power Systems ranked third with a 9.4 percent revenue share. Lenovo was in fourth place while IBM came in at fifth.
Revenues were up 12 percent to $20.9 billion in the first quarter of 2021.
Sales of volume servers were still up by 15.4 percent to $17.3 billion, however midrange server sales fell by 2.7 percent to $2.4 billion.
Maguranis said the considerable increase of server investments during the quarter was buoyed by “global economic tailwinds” along with “increased investments targeting the modernisation of business applications, data centre infrastructure, and IT operations”. COVID-19 wasn’t mentioned.
