Hewlett-Packard knocked IBM from the top spot in worldwide server revenue during the first quarter, as the market for x86 systems picked up but sales of Unix and mainframe systems continued to decline, Gartner said on Tuesday.
Hewlett-Packard knocked IBM from the top spot in worldwide server revenue during the first quarter, as the market for x86 systems picked up but sales of Unix and mainframe systems continued to decline, Gartner said on Tuesday.
Woohoo, first comment!
Guess less OSnews reader care about servers than they do about smartphones
I was actually looking forward to Thom’s commentary on the subject; guess he doesn’t have much to say…
Edited 2010-05-27 06:56 UTC
I’ll just say that ‘Duh!’ IBMs are freaking expensive for one thing, even their x86 stuff.
For the other thing. Why buy a big mainframe with a Unix on it, when you can get an x86 for a 100th the price, slap Linux, BSD, etc on it and have a Unix system with mainframe performance.
Granted there really isn’t anything with the processing awesomeness of that Power 7 IBM just released, but I’m sure those things don’t come cheap.
To add to that, many places have workloads that are not increasing as fast as hardware performance is, for which cheap memory has all but solved any problems they had, and/or for which a small load-balanced cluster or replicated warm spare can do for them, making their own software for the job from fresh requirements, what others needed RAS in the chips for (and for whom changing is more expensive, since their trusted software is so tied to the hardware features).
The big boys will still be needed, as long as serial I/O and beefy not-so-great-at-scaling-out FP workloads are around, but x86’s momentum carries it forward, and into their markets.