Does no one love Linux any more for now ?
IDC's latest survey of server vendors shows boxes running every kind of operating system – except Unix -- sold more during the last three months of 2010, even mainframes.
Sales of Linux servers rose 29 percent; Windows rose 16.8 percent, but with a volume of 1.5 million boxes, compared to Linux' paltry 450,000.
Last July IBM shipped a new mainframe called the zEnterprise designed specifically to be the core management point for data centers – linking blades, clusters, virtual servers and other mixed systems with layers of management and reliability software that is better developed on mainframes than anywhere else.Most surprisingly, sales of mainframes shot up 69 percent during the fourth quarter, to $1.4 billion – the highest growth rate IDC ever found on mainframes.
Sales of Unix boxes of all flavors rose only four-tenths of one percent.
The $3.8 billion spent on Unix boxes during the quarter was still 25.6 percent of all spending on servers. Given the big increases in sales of other boxes, though, it's a pretty sad showing.
