Sales of servers grew by 5.6 per cent in the most recent quarter to $12.2bn, according to a new study from analyst firm IDC. This marked a ninth consecutive quarter of growth for the server market.

Improvements centred around so-called volume servers, inexpensive industry standard models often powered by x86 processors made by Intel or AMD.

Volume server sales increased by 11.1 per cent year-over-year, and midrange servers showed a 4.3 per cent sales increase. Sales of high end systems, however, which include mainframes, shrunk by three per cent.

Server sales increased across all operating systems. Linux systems led the pack with 45.1 per cent revenue growth, although its 11.5 per cent share of the overall market remains small relative to Windows and Unix systems.

Windows grew 14.3 per cent, claiming 33.5 per cent of all server sales. Unix remained king with 35.2 per cent share, despite a meagre sales increase of 2.5 per cent.

IBM held on to the lead in the overall server market in terms of revenues, claiming a share of 31.9 per cent. HP followed with 28.5 per cent.

Sun Microsystems and Dell recorded 11.3 and 10.5 per cent market share respectively, but Dell keeps closing on its rival.

Rival analyst firm Gartner showed a similar picture earlier in the week, pegging overall server sales at $12.1bn, an increase of 4.7 per cent year-over-year.

Although the two analyst firms often show different pictures in their figures, they do agree on general trends and shifts in market share.