There’s a big scorch mark where server sales used to be according to IDC, which put out its worst-since-records-have-been-kept Q2 figures Wednesday, hoping that with the installed base growing increasing hoary with age buyers are starting to replace them.

The researcher said factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 30.1% to $9.8 billion in Q2, the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue decline.

Server shipments declined 30.4%, worse than the 26.5% decline of Q1.

No type of server was spared. Volume systems dropped 30% with the lowest revenues since ‘03; mid-range fell 28.1% and the high-end 32%. IDC said it was the third consecutive quarter that all three server segments fell.

Everybody did poorly. IBM’s worldwide revenue dropped 26.3%, HP’s 30.4% and Dell’s 26.8%. Sun’s results were the worst, down 37.2% with Fujitsu down 35%.

The non-x86 market, including RISC- EPIC- and CISC-based systems, declined 32.2% to $4.7 billion. After outperforming x86 servers recently, this is the first time in the past six quarters that non-x86 servers have underperformed x86 servers in the market.

Windows server revenue came to $3.7 billion down 27.7% and still the single largest segment of spending by operating system worldwide.

Linux server revenue declined 28.9% to $1.3 billion. Linux servers now represent 13.8% of all server revenue, up slightly from 13.5% a year ago.

Unix server revenue tanked by 30.9% to $3.1 billion, representing roughly a third of the overall spend. IBM gained 7.4 points of share to 41.4% and is the Unix leader, followed by Sun (27.3%) and HP (24.8%) based on factory revenue.

Only 1.4 million x86 servers moved in the quarter. IBM gained 1.4 points of share on a 21.8% year-over-year factory revenue decline. HP led the market with 36.9% of the revenue while Dell held second place with 23.7% of the revenue compared to IBM’s 17.5%.

IDC tried to cushion the blow by observing that it’s a rough compare against last year’s strong second quarter and that unit shipments did increase quarter-over-quarter.

Blade servers declined for the second quarter in a row with factory revenue falling 12.1% year-over-year on a 19.8% shipment decline.

IBM exhibited the strongest blade server performance of the top 5 OEMs, gaining 3.8 points of share on 2.3% year-over-year factory revenue growth. HP led the market with 52.9% of the revenues with IBM second at 27.2% and Dell third with 9.1%.

IDC said that compared to the overall server market, blades did relatively well.