Server Sales on the Rise, Says Gartner

Server system sales increased 15 percent in the third quarter, according to a Gartner report recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal. That’s good news for tech vendors who have had to suffer through a massive contraction in the purchase of servers last year.

But that’s not to suggest that data center power, cooling and space problems are a thing of the past. Rather, Gartner reports that these remain top concerns for today’s chief information officers and data center managers. Worse yet, many industry observers consider data centers to be modern smokestacks, threatening the environment and gobbling precious resources. In fact, the U.S. EPA estimates that U.S. energy consumption by data centers will almost double in the next five years

ZDNet reports that Gartner offers these tips for eliminating cooling capacity problems:

Properly gathering and assessing the impact of new hardware on space, power and cooling using

Introducing tools that monitor servers’ energy consumption on an ongoing basis

Developing and deploying consolidation and virtualization strategies

Among today’s server manufacturers, Gartner reports that Hewlett-Packard dominated the market with revenue increasing 22.5 percent in the quarter. Dell, on the other hand, witnessed revenue rise 25.6 percent while IBM and Fujitsu experienced a 9.9 percent and 5.2 percent uptick respectively.

Gartner reports that Oracle witnessed a 2.6 percent drop in server revenue. The tech giant jumped on the server bandwagon in January with the $7.30 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. In September, Oracle announced plans to launch new products combining its software with that of Sun Microsystems.

Nevertheless, Gartner’s findings point to overall growth for the entire tech industry. More and more high-tech companies are banking on increasing technology spent on hardware such as servers in recessionary times to drive revenue. In fact, Gartner has forecasted a 5.3 percent rise in global IT spending in 2010 to $3.4 trillion, after a 4.6 percent fall in 2009.