A new report on the server market suggests changing dynamics in the data center.

Q2 2014 saw global sales of servers grow by just 1.3% on the same period last year.

However, in the same period, revenue grew at more than double the rate of unit sales (2.8%) according to market analyst the Gartner Group.

The global figures are subject to considerable regional variations however.

While Eastern Europe (with unit sales down 5.6% and revenue declining 1.6%) and Japan (units down 4.3%, revenue down 2.5%) showed national markets universally in decline, some markets displayed ambivalent results.~

In Latin America, unit sales dropped heavily (by 16.5%) but revenue was actually in surplus compared to the equivalent period last year, up by 6.7%, which was the highest increase in any region in the world.

Another emerging economic region, the Middle East and Africa, posted the highest shipment growth with a 6%, with sales increases in Asia Pacific a close second at 5%.

The more developed markets of North America and Europe grew more slowly at 1.6% and 0.8% respectively.

Gartner’s research VP Jeffrey Hewitt said: "Q2 2014 produced relatively weak growth on a global level, with mixed results by platform."

Traditional x86 servers managed an increase of 1.4% in unit volumes, but an 8.1% increase in revenue, indicating that margins are still available in a mature server market.

On the other hand, sales of RISC/Itanium Unix servers plummeted 23.2% in revenue and 7.9% in units shipped.

Mainframes, an even older processor type than x86 based servers, went down (in terms of revenue) by 2.2%, Gartner reported.

Of the vendors, HP leads the market with US$3.2bn in server revenue to account for 25.1% of worldwide server revenue.

Even HP's worldwide server shipments declined (by 2.9%) but not as much as Dell’s which fell by 11.4%.

Meanwhile blade servers fell 4.3% (by shipment numbers) while the equivalent rack-optimized form factor climbed 2.9%.

Revenue on blade servers still rose (7.2%) at twice the rate of rack servers, whose revenues grew by 3.6% in revenue in Q2 2014.