It can be hard to figure out the growth of the data center industry. One data point is Intel’s sales of its data center server chips.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan digs into this aspect.

Regarding the data center, Smith said on a conference call:

If you look at the trends in the fourth quarter, I think the trends actually reinforce the growth rate among cloud, high performance computing, networking, storage. They all came in consistent with what we thought. As we entered Q4, we saw that we had more inventory out in the world than we knew when we started the quarter so that had to be burned off. And then secondly, we saw a tapering off in order patterns across certain customers. We think that was driven by the government shutdown and the uncertainty around the debt ceiling. Because when you look at the customers and the segments it's pretty clearly in those segments. We had a range around growth rates for 2014 and the investor meeting we said 10 to 15%. Based on a slower growth in enterprise in Q4 and maybe a slower recovery in enterprise over the course of 2014, I'd say we're now at the lower end of that range. So we're more at the 10% range than the 15% part.