The headline for IDC's press release on the 4Q09 server market sums things up nicely: "Worldwide Server Market Rebounds Sharply in Fourth Quarter as Demand for Blades and x86 Systems Leads the Way." Gartner found that while the worldwide server market recovered in the second half of 2009 from the economic downturn, plummeting sales in high-end systems resulted in a decline in overall revenue in the fourth quarter.

Server sales are beginning to stabilize, reports IDC and Gartner in analyses on the July-September period. The IT research and advisory firms both found revenue down in the worldwide server market during the third quarter of 2009, however the decrease was less than anticipated and demonstrated an increase over the first and second quarters of this year.

To be sure, virtualization cuts real estate costs drastically since the practice eliminates the need for incremental growth of datacenters. But, if users create one virtual machine after another, they are doing little to ease the task of provisioning, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing workload performance across both their remaining physical and growing virtual resources. That's where Sun Ops Center 2.5 comes in handy, as Jean Bozman, Gary Chen and Mary Turner point out in their brief IDC paper, "Sun Ops Center 2.5: Managing Mixed Environments in Virtualized Sun Infrastructure."