Server Census - Annual Shipments and Installed Base, 2005

This IDC study is a data-intensive document that shows annual server shipments and installed base as of January 1, 2006. All major vendors worldwide are shown with data broken out into the worldwide and U.S. markets.

By analyzing the data, the reader should be able to answer the following questions:

The installed base grew from 5.6 million units in 1996 to over 27 million units in 2005. Most of these new servers cost less than $6,000. "A vendor must be able to analyze retirement rates and recognize that a system costing less than $25,000 is going to be replaced in four years while a large-scale enterprise server may be in the field for over 12 years as it is redeployed from a mission-critical workload to a less demanding second-tier workload," said Lloyd Cohen, research director, Enterprise Server Technologies.