Apple Enters the top 10 list in Server Sales – Sells 1 mile high stack of XServes a year

On the Surface, this is very interesting news.   Apple is in the Top 10 list of server sales – – –  woohoo!  I mean they weren’t there last quarter but they are there this quarter, right?  Top 10…that’s pretty hot?  Well….

I don’t think IBM, Dell, Sun and HP should be sweating over ol’ Apple just yet.  If you look at the numbers, Apple came in 10th place with 8700 Units sold.  That’s all you need to break into the top 10?!  I mean isn’t that about how many one of those crazy supercomputer setups that Virginia Tech (1100) and the Army (1500) built plus a couple of ad agencies and schools?  Expanded out over a year, that’s equivalent to 35,000 units or the equivalent of about 30 seconds of iPod sales…  Just for fun, lets do the math on that:

35000x1U/12 = 5100 feet.  So Apple sells a stack of Xserves 1 mile high.  Interesting.  (1U=1.75inches)

The good news is that it wouldn’t be too startling to see Apple climb even higher with Acer and Hitachi coming in 8th and 9th with 14,900 and 9,000 respectively.  A hardware refresh at WWDC likely won’t mean as much for Apple now that Leopard has been pushed back a quarter in shipping so Apple will likely fall off or stay put in the next quarter.  However, once the pent up demand for Leopard has been released, Apple could make a run for the 8 spot.

Something like a native virtualization package in Leopard Server (or how about Apple Enterprise marketing getting off their a55 and get the word out for once what great enterprise products exist) would push that figure even higher.