"The two server categories that exhibited the greatest strengths were x86 and blade servers, says Jeffrey Hewitt, research director at Gartner. x86 servers and x86 blade servers continue to be the systems of choice for growing the front and middle tiers of the Web infrastructure.
 
Risc-Itanium Unix servers grew by 1,8% in shipments for the quarter but dropped a more significant 2,6% in revenue, Hewitt says. This segment continues to be hotly contested on a global basis, but suffered from constrained revenue overall in the second quarter.
 
IBM continues to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue. IBMs System x/x Series and System z/z Series grew during the second quarter of 2006, but it experienced declines in System i/i Series and System p/p Series, which resulted in a slight overall revenue decline of 1,7%.

IBM did manage to increase its shipments by 13,8%, which allowed it to gain one-tenth of one percent of worldwide server shipment share for the quarter. IBM retained its overall blade server lead in revenue and shipments as its blade server shipments increased by 45,4% in the quarter.
 
In server shipments, Hewlett-Packard dropped 0,1% in share, but it retained its worldwide server shipment lead and extended the share gap between it and second-place Dell by just over two percentage points. HPs year-over-year shipment growth was 12,5% in total. HPs ProLiant and Integrity product lines increased by 13,4% and 7,9%, respectively, while HPs remaining server brands fell for the period. These shipment dynamics dragged HPs overall revenue down 3,8% for the period.
 
Sun Microsystems posted significant annual growth in shipments and revenue for the period - 13,1% and 13,7% respectively. The only other global vendor to have growth in the second quarter for revenue and shipments was Fujitsu/FSC. Dell did manage to increase server shipments by 2,3% over the same quarter last year, but it experienced a drop in server revenue of 1,8% for the same period.