This is a guest post from Larry Dignan of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Larry on his ZDNet blog Between the Lines, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Oracle has thrown down the hardware gauntlet against IBM to stem the bleeding at soon-to-be-acquired Sun Microsystems-assuming the EU plays along-but Red Hat may be among the big winners amid the server wars.

Too often, we look at IBM’s shredding of Sun on server sales as a hardware story. IBM, HP and Dell appear to be taking share from Sun. So much so that Oracle is opening a blitz to stop the Sun bleeding and take on IBM directly.

Here’s the IDC tally:

 

So what is replacing these Sun boxes? A few industry contacts-who conduct some of these server swaps-have noted that Sun is being replaced by Dell, HP and IBM boxes. And most of these boxes are running Red Hat.

Add it up it appears that while most of us are focused on the server wars Red Hat may be quietly gaining share in the background as Linux gains share.