IDC reports that EMC, IBM and Hewlett-Packard lead the world storage disk markets and that total storage capacity shipped has grown by a staggering 60 percent from a year ago.Three days after IDC crowned IBM as king of the world disk and tape storage hardware market, the same research firm on June 7 anointed Hewlett-Packard as the new No. 1 in worldwide total disk storage systems revenue for the first quarter.
HP, which had been slipping in storage market share in recent months, made a comeback of sorts to sell $1.2 billion in storage hardware and win back the top spot from Big Blue with a 20.1 percent market share, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.
IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., came in second with $1.1 billion in sales, or 18.3 percent of the total disk hardware market, followed by EMC ($912 million, 14.8 percent), Dell ($574 million, 9.3) and Hitachi ($373 million, 6.1 percent). Dell posted the strongest year-over-year revenue growth (12 percent) during the quarter, IDC said.
On June 4, IDC reported that IBM, with $28.2 billion in total disk and tape hardware sales in 2006 and 22.2 percent of the market, was the top revenue producer in the world sector over second-place HP, with 20.9 percent.
In the June 7 report, EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., continued its dominance in the world external disk market revenue stream, bringing in $912 million (21.2 percent) compared to second-place HPs $575 million (13.4 percent). IBM ($545 million, 12.7 percent), Dell ($383 million, 8.9 percent) and Hitachi ($365 million, 8.5 percent) made up the rest of the top five in that category.
Overall, sales of entry-level and lower-end external disk storage systems led the way in the quarter, IDC said.
World factory revenues grew $239 million, posting 5.9 percent growth from a year ago to $4.3 billion, IDC said. For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market grew to $6.1 billion, up 7.2 percent from the prior years first quarter.
Big jump in total capacity shipped
Total disk storage systems capacity shipped surpassed 1,000 petabytes for the second consecutive quarter, growing a staggering 60.4 percent over the first quarter of 2006.
IDC said the total network disk storage market, which is NAS (network-attached storage) combined with open SAN (storage area network), posted 14.3 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter, to more than $3 billion. EMC continued to maintain its leadership in the total network storage market, with 26.9 percent revenue share, followed by HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., and IBM, with 13.5 percent and 11.4 percent revenue share, respectively.
EMC leads in open SAN, NAS markets
In the open SAN market, which grew 15.3 percent year over year, EMC also was the No. 1 vendor, with 25.1 percent revenue share, followed by HP with 15.6 percent. The NAS market grew 10.9 percent year over year, led by EMC with 33.3 percent market share and followed by Network Appliance, with 29.6 percent share.
Click here to read more about world disk storage revenues.
The iSCSI SAN market showed strong momentum, posting 68.6 percent revenue growth compared to the prior years quarter. Network Appliance continues to lead the market with 24.3 percent share, followed by EMC with 14.6 percent share.
IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and, in some instances, host bus adapters, associated with three or more disks.
A system may be located outside of or within a server cabinet, and the average cost of the disk storage systems does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and non-bundled storage software, IDC said.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
