Revenue for all types of servers grew 16.4 percent from a year earlier, while the number of servers delivered grew 6.5 percent in the quarter, Gartner said. The company cited the replacement of x86 servers that companies had held on to through the global recession in 2009, as well as the introduction of the Nehalem family of processors from Intel and new Opteron chips from AMD late in 2009.

Gartner believes the replacement of x86 servers following the economic downturn has passed its peak and will slow this year.

IBM led the industry in revenue for the quarter, with a US$5.2 billion in sales, or 35.5 percent of the market. Sales of System X and mainframe System Z platforms helped IBM during the quarter, with the System Z line showing a 68.3 percent increase in revenue, according to Gartner.

HP came in behind IBM for revenue, with 30.4 percent of the market, but led in unit shipments for the quarter, delivering 767,026 servers or 32.2 percent of the total. Dell was the second-biggest vendor by shipments in the quarter, with 515,274 or 21.6 percent of the industry total. Dell was also the third-biggest company in revenue.

Oracle suffered a 40.8 percent drop in shipments and a 16.2 percent decline in server revenue from last year's fourth quarter, when its server business was still owned by Sun Microsystems. Cisco Systems, in its first full year of shipping servers after the introduction of its Unified Computing System in 2009, earned a market share in the low single digits, Gartner said.