The numbers are in – Linux server sales are up

While the overall server market declined last year, fourth quarter 2002 server revenue was up from the prior quarter for the top four server vendors – thanks to Linux.

According to figures released last week by Gartner’s Dataquest division, sales of servers worldwide from Dell, IBM, HP and Sun were up in the final quarter of last year. Overall, server revenue for the fourth quarter of 2002 was up 13%, compared to the third quarter of the same year. 

IBM was the top seller of Linux servers for the whole of 2002, raking in $759 million in Linux server hardware revenue – almost 40% of the market. Meanwhile, HP and Dell came in second and third place, respectively in Linux server sales.

Linux servers are still a small part of the overall market – only 4% of enterprise servers sold last year were preconfigured with Linux. But the $2 billion in Linux server sales in 2002 was up 63% from the year before.

Despite an overall down market, the fact that server shipments grew slightly in 2002 – around 3% over the previous year – shows that enterprises are buying more inexpensive Intel-based servers running Windows and Linux, as opposed to larger proprietary Unix boxes from Sun, HP and IBM, or mainframes from Big Blue. Unix servers did take a hit as a result, dropping from $19.4 billion in 2001 to $17.2 billion last year.