Things are suddenly looking up for server makers, with sales in the category growing faster in the last quarter than at any time since 2010.

Gartner Inc.’s preliminary estimates show the worldwide server market expanded by 18 percent in the first quarter to $13.39 billion, while unit shipments rose by 13 percent to 2.66 million. Gartner’s research director Adrian O’Connell attributed the sudden growth to hyper-scale build outs among North America firms, and said it amounts to the “second-largest-volume quarter ever” for the industry, in an interview with The Register.

Breaking things down a bit, Gartner said shipments of Intel-based servers grew by 13.2 percent over the previous year, with revenues growing by 14.5 percent. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell into decline however, with shipments and revenues falling by 2.9 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively.

Most suprisingly, the mainframe segment saw revenues shoot up by 95.1 percent.

As far as vendors go, Hewlett-Packard Co. remains at the top of the tree, despite seeing slower than average growth compared with other industry players (just 10.4 percent). Even so, HP still dominates the market with 23. 8 percent of its total revenues, down from 25.5 percent in the previous quarter.

Dell Inc., which surpassed IBM late last year, saw its revenues grow by 14. 4 percent as it kept hold of second place, despite seeing its overall market share fall from 17.7 percent in the last quarter to 17.1 percent now.

Of course the reason that IBM slipped down the pecking order was because it sold its x86 server business to China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. last year. As a result, it saw revenues fall by 15.9 percent, while its total market share fell from 198. percent in the last quarter to just 14.1 percent now.

As for Lenovo, the x86 purchase helped it secure a 7.2 percent share of the market.

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