SAN JOSE -- June quarter sales of servers grew to $12.1 billion worldwide, up 4.7% year-over-year, a leading research firm said today.

Revenue fell 1.6% sequentially, Gartner Inc. said.

For the quarter, IBM was the market leader, at a 30.4% share, followed by HP (29%), Sun Microsystems (11.9%) and Dell (11.1%).

Sales of x86 servers -- the largest market segment -- rose 10.6% to $5.9 billion, but ticked down from $6 billion sequentially.

Linux server revenues grew 31.6% year-over-year, to $1.5 billion. Linux servers were up 2.3% over the March quarter.

Blade servers saw the most growth, with revenues rising 48.7% over a year ago and reaching $418.6 million in Q2. Blade server sales fell 0.3% sequentially.

The U.S. was the top region in terms of revenue, at 39.2%, followed by Western Europe (26.8), Asia Pacific (13.1) and Japan (10 %).