Dell CEO: Linux server sales increasing faster than Windows

[stampeder]

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Dell said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims.

http://software.silicon.com/os/0,390...9168818,00.htm

[jvincent]

I'm guessing that the Windows server market is in a different field than mine (ASIC/HW design) but I know in that particular market that it is very much a Linux world.

The migration away from Unix (Sun OS/HP) has been happening steadily for many years now in the field of CAD for HW and IC design. Personally it's been about 8 years since I bought a non-Linux server.

[hugh]

Fifteen years ago, the server market was all UNIX and AS400.

The real hurting ponies in the business server market are probably IBM / SUN and HP that have seen AIX / AS400/ Solaris and Unix sales suffer. I don't MS ever had much presence in that space.

I think what is really driving Linux adoption in servers is the net. The internet runs on LAMP servers!

[stampeder]

IBM and HP got on board with Linux a long time ago so they're not hurting...

The situation with Sun is more complex, but they're still alive and kicking and you can run Linux on their hardware as needed.

I remember when Michael Dell seemed like a sock puppet for Microsoft, so to me its quite informative that he's setting the record straight on server sales from his company. Its called business sense, and he's jumping horses as required.

[hugh]

IBM and HP got on board with Linux a long time ago so they're not hurting...

They're not hurting but Linux has hurt them a great deal by eroding margins on hardware and OS sales.

In the last 10 to 15 years, HP and IBM have gone through some VERY serious retrenchments thanks to Windows and Linux.

Profits at IBM in hardware and OS had been in decline for years and there were many folks that argued IBM and HP should have been split up because the outlooks were so bad.

The saving grace for IBM was Global Services (ie. getting away from harware and OS) while for HP it was the INK business. For years the only thing that made money at HP was selling printer ink. I doubt HP makes a dime now thanks to Linux

[stampeder]

IBM has been playing a leading role in commercial Linux, so they've been well in charge of their future on that front. HP's recent history has been such a mess that its hard to say what impact Linux has truly had on them. When I was still teaching for HP we were gearing up to change over almost all the educational material from their PA-RISC hardware to the new Itanium-based Superdome servers, and there was no mention of Linux. When Itanium became "Itanic" and Carly Fiorina bought Compaq (which included the former DEC) I was glad to get away from there due to all the confusion. HP will now sell you almost any x86 server you want with Linux on it.

To me the more interesting thing about Dell's revelation is that Microsoft has to be really worrying about all this, especially as they'd like to roll out Server 2008 to stop this market change.

[grog]

I wouldn't really consider this to be that big of a revelation. All Dell said was Linux was growing faster. In fact, his exact words were "On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows." Without seeing the raw numbers he's referring to it's hard to draw any significant conclusions from such a statement.

Like others have pointed out, I think the majority of the growth in the Linux space has been at the expense of the traditional Unix vendors rather than Microsoft. Migrating from Unix to Linux is a much more natural path than Unix to Windows. However, in my experience Microsoft has been making gains in the server arena too (although I'm sure not as quickly as Microsoft would like). 10 years ago the idea of running any sort of mission critical application on a Microsoft platform was almost unheard of. Not so today. For instance, Microsoft SQL Server is continuing to grow in popularity and they're coming close to taking the number 2 spot from IBM DB2 (Oracle still has the much bigger overall share though).

Bottom line - Linux's market share in the server space may be growing nicely but Microsoft's server share is still growing too. In fact, I just did a search on the topic and some recent Gartner numbers showed a different trend:

According to Gartner, Microsoft was up 2%, bringing its total market share to 67.1% of servers shipped during Q2 2007. Of the 2.06 million servers shipped in Q2, about 1.4 million were supplied with Windows. Linux, on the other hand, accounted for 22.8% of server shipments. That was a decrease of from the 23.1% share the OS held at this time in 2006.

http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.tech...osoft-gains-2/

[jvillain]

I have been a dedicated Linux admin for nearly as long as Linux has been around and I saw almost no interest from Windows shops to move to Linux until about a year and a half ago when people started to realize what Vista was going to mean to them. Since then I have been taking lots of calls from people looking for alternatives to Exchange and Active Directory. Database migrations are picking up as well.

[stampeder]

Originally Posted by grog

Linux's market share in the server space may be growing nicely but Microsoft's server share is still growing too.

grog, the central point of this thread is that Michael Dell, of all people, is publicly saying that sales strength numbers for Linux are growing faster vis-a-vis Windows from his own shop. Gartner's numbers don't make any difference in this context because how can both OSes offered by his company *both* be growing in relation to each other? In plain logic, they cannot, and UNIX numbers don't apply to Dell. Microsoft cannot be pleased with that on the cusp of their Windows Server 2008 launch.

Regarding Gartner numbers and similar "server shipment" analyses, I take them with great scepticism because we're back to the old DHC argument about how Linux and "server shipments" are not sensible to equate due to the open and free accessibility to Linux. Once hardware has been bought (no matter which OS was preloaded onto it) that hardware becomes open to the IT shop to do with as they wish. My experience in global computing environments shows that Linux gets installed onto lots of those machines under the radar. Other DHCers state that this is not so, based on their own experience. Oh well.

Microsoft must be really ticked at Michael Dell for what he said!