Worldwide server shipments grew 2.4% annually in the second quarter, while total revenue went up by 2.8%, according to Gartner.
Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, said the growth was down to a strong regional performance in Asia/Pacific as a result of data centre infrastructure build-outs - mostly in China - and global ongoing hyperscale data centre growth.
As organisations continue to turn to hybrid cloud deployments and increasingly use on-demand software and services through managed service providers, the data centre server growth may well continue.
Gartner said shipments for x86 servers increased 2.5% and 6.9% in revenue terms. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell globally for the period, down 21.4% in shipments and 24.9% in vendor value terms. The other CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a revenue decline of 29.5%.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 9.4%, the company posted $3.2bn in revenue for a total share of 23% for the second quarter of 2017.
Dell EMC maintained the number two position with 7% sales growth and 19.9% market share, although it was slightly ahead of HPE when it came to shipments.
Huawei experienced the highest revenue growth in the quarter with 57.8%.The total global server market for the second quarter was worth just under $14bn, and the total number of shipments was 2.8 million servers.