“All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue except for Western Europe which posted a 4.9 percent decline in revenue for the period. Asia/Pacific grew the most significantly in shipments with a 23.9 percent increase. Eastern Europe posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 27.4 percent for the period.”

All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the third quarter of 2011, except HP and Oracle. HP declined 3.6 percent year-on-year and Oracle achieved only flat growth. IBM took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over $3.8 billion in server vendor revenue for a total market share of 29.7 percent for the third quarter of 2011. This share was down 0.5 percent year-on-year. Most of IBM’s revenue growth came from its Power Systems line with some contribution by System X as well.

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 7.6 percent in units and 9.3 percent in revenue. Some regions like Western Europe and the United States did not produce as much relative x86-based server growth because of comparatively stronger third quarter results in 2010. RISC/Itanium Worldwide Unix server shipments declined 6.8 percent, but vendor revenue increased 3.5 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 6.9 percent,” Hewitt said.

Despite lower sales numbers, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2011 with 693,265 units shipped in the third quarter. HP managed to maintain a market share of 29.2 percent. Dell followed ahead of IBM with a market share of 21.8 and 12.1 respectivly.

In terms of server form factors, blade servers rose 3.3 percent in shipments and 7.6 percent in revenue for the quarter. The rack-optimized form factor climbed 8.2 percent in shipments and 6.3 percent in revenue for the third quarter of 2011.

Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

Chances are some things will break but that most internet users won't notice. Some web sites might temporarily disappear because some networks may try, but be unable, to connect to the new-style addresses. The real purpose of the test day is to discover the impact of a large-scale shift to IPv6 on the millions of servers, routers, and switches that make up the internet.

The inertia that has resisted the deployment of IPv6 for years is finally being overcome by a simple reality: The 4 billion or so internet addresses available under the older IPv4 protocol have been exhausted. IPv6 offers an address pool that is, for all practical purposes, bottomless even if every person on earth has billions of devices that need network addresses.

IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, compared to 32 bits for IPv4. A computer with an IPv4 address of 192.168.1.12 (a typical "private" address on a home network) might get an IPv6 address of 2001:0000:4137:9e76:100c:0bf4:3f57:fef7. That's a base-16, or hexadecimal, number; the letters a-f represents digits for 10 through 15.

But the new protocol offers additional advantages. It has built-in provisions for security, particularly data encryption, that are missing from IPv4. Devices assign themselves addresses automatically when they connect to a network, eliminating the need for a server to keep track of assignments. IPv6 is designed to let devices connect to multiple networks simultaneous, making home networking and mobile communications easier.

The trick remains getting from here to there. Most large enterprises should be largely or completely IPv6-enabled, since all computers and operating systems from the past few years are compatible with the new protocol, as are many commercial routers and other network gear. Homes and smaller businesses are more problematic. The computers are mostly ready, but home networking gear may not be. Residential internet service providers are also far from ready; and success is dependent upon IPv6 being available on their networks, so many home based users and small businesses may have to upgrade and test their equipment.

Until now, the great majority of servers on the internet have been running only IPv4. Test IPv6 servers typically have names like ipv6.server1.test-ipv6.com and are invisible to the IPv4 network. On June 8, participating companies including most of the biggest players in the tech industry will turn on IPv6 addressing on their regular servers, meaning that both addressing schemes will be active simultaneously on the same machines. In theory, devices using IPv4 addresses should reach these servers using the older protocols and the relatively few systems using IPv6 will connect with the new protocol. In practice, some systems will probably try to use IPv6 and will run into a roadblock somewhere along the way. It's those network problems that the test is supposed to detect.

Eventually, some servers and sites on the net will become IPv6 only. Fortunately, there are tools that will allow IPv6-enabled systems to connect with each other by tunneling through IPv4 networks. But that is not likely to become an issue for at least a year or two. In the end, the conversion to the new addressing system is likely to take place out of the sight of most internet users. But the result will be a better and more efficient network for everyone.

Many ISP’s and enterprises will switch their servers to the new Internet Protocol IPv6 on Wednesday, June 8, to discover bottlenecks and other issues that may arise. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"The first quarter continued a quarterly trend of year-on-year growth in both shipments and vendor revenue," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, with the exception of Japan.”

All the top five global vendors except Fujitsu had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2011. HP was the market leader, based on worldwide server revenue. The company posted just over $3.8 billion in worldwide server vendor revenue for a total share of 30.2 percent for the first quarter of 2011. This share was down 1.2 percent year-on-year.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2011 with a year-on-year shipment increase of 2.3 percent for the quarter. This growth was driven by increases produced from HP's ProLiant brand. HP's worldwide server shipment share was 29.8 percent, representing a 1.8 percent drop in share from the same quarter in 2010.

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 percent in units for the year and 17.5 percent in revenue,” Hewitt said. “Following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments, and this was the case in the first quarter for all regions. RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 percent in shipments and 20.7 percent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year. The "other" CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a growth in vendor revenue of 19.6 percent."

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, HP and IBM posted year-on-year increases in units for the first quarter. In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers rose 6.1 percent in shipments and 24.6 percent in revenue for the quarter of 2011. The rack-optimized form factor had the highest shipment growth at 11.2 percent and climbed 19.6 percent in revenue for the first quarter.

Worldwide server shipments are up in the first quarter of 2011, with the exception of Japan. Eastern Europe also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 36.0 percent for the period. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

RHN Satellite 5.4 delivers compliance improvements, and greater flexibility in content and subscription management, the Raleigh based company says. It also provides support for managing the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Administrators can use the management tool to patch some versions of Sun Solaris.

"We've been using Red Hat Network Satellite for several years now as a key component in the efficient management of our IT Operations," said Kevin Masaryk, senior Linux/UNIX administrator at Salt River Project. "We continue to be impressed with the power and versatility of the product and are excited to see the release of version 5.4."

The systems management platform offers a single interface to optimize groups of Linux systems regardless of the architecture they are deployed on to ensure compliance with best practice security standards and regulations such as PCI-DSS, FISMA, and HIPAA. It enables IT organizations to manage the lifecycle of Red Hat deployments and perform audits of their infrastructure.

RHN Satellite 5.4 allows administrators to schedule staged deployments and update thousands of systems during short maintenance windows. Third-party content including firmware repositories can be managed, and the new FlexGuest environment adds guest support through a virtual environment.

The web-based interface allows administrators to instantly see the status of the most critical systems. The management tool can be used to control the entire application stack on all Red Hat and non-Red Hat Linux deployments from a single console. New deployments can be made based on existing system profiles.

A short video outlining the capabilities of RHN Satellite 5.4 is available here, and system requirements are outlined here.

The poll found that 76.4 percent of companies sampled are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months, while only 41.2 percent of respondents are planning to add Windows servers in the next year. 43.6 percent say they will decrease or maintain the number of existing Windows servers in their organization. Over the next five years, 79.4 percent of respondents plan on adding more Linux, relative to other operating systems, compared to only 21.3 percent planning on adding more Microsoft servers. 60.2 percent of respondents reporting that they plan to use Linux for more mission-critical workloads than they have in the past. Technical superiority and security are the top benefits cited, the study says.

Migrations to Linux from Windows are surpassing those from Unix, and 66 percent of users surveyed say that their Linux deployments are brand new deployments. Cloud adoption is surprisingly low, with only 26 percent planning on moving applications and/or services to the cloud in the coming 12 months. Linux dominates when moving to the cloud, with 70.3 percent using Linux as their primary cloud platform.

Another important aspect of the survey concludes that 86.5 percent of respondents feel Linux continues to improve. The perception of Linux by management has also shifted, with nearly 60 percent reporting that their CIO sees Linux as more strategic to the organization as compared to three years ago. 38.3 percent of respondents citing a lack of Linux talent as one of their main concerns related to the platform.

While Linux is often touted as a "free alternative" to Windows, the survey concludes that 58.6 percent of the respondents said that the recession did not impact their decision to use an open source operating system. As in the past, the lack of drivers is still the biggest obstacle to adopt Linux, 39.4 percent of the pool said.

The complete 12-page report (registration required) is available here.

The illustration shows the use of Linux among the world’s largest enterprises as of October 2010. Graphic: Linux Foundation