A number of customers have mentioned over the years that surely IBM & HP must be worried about virtualisation impinging on overall hardware sales. I always said that the kinds of servers that people buy for virtualisation are usually significantly more expensive than the customers would previously have purchased. This means that the volume might be lower, but the overall spend has a tendency to be as high if not higher.

This seems to have been the case for IBM at least as they have managed to get back to the top of the server hardware sales tree in the second quarter. With revenues topping $3.9B according to Gartner which means they overtake HP with total sales at $3.8B. The interesting bit to me is how IBM can sell less than half (302,000) that of HP (680,000) and still make more money.

I read about this story over at the Avastu Blog of Tarry Singh. I particularly like this blog for its informative and insightful post.

I don’t like to show favouritism, but IBM do make some incredible kit. I know it isn’t cool to get excited about servers, but I had the privilege of seeing a new M2 version of the excellent x3850.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, but some of the design enhancements were incredible.

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Sun have just announced a potentially market conquering piece of kit called the Sun Fire X4450 server.

This puppy is a 2U server that support 4 x Quad Core Intel Xeon CPUs with a colossal 128GB of RAM via its 32 Dimm Slots.

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Just as most people suspected, HP have released a comparable product to IBM’s BladeCenter S product.

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