Dell, NetApp Maintain Market Traction

EMC and IBM continue to lead the pack in the storage industry, but trend-type news is being made by three other companies slightly down the list, according to research firm IDC.

Dell and Network Appliance continue to gain market share steadily each quarter, while Hewlett-Packard is losing ground, IDC reported March 6 in a report on the worldwide disk storage industry for 2007. EMC and IBM remain on their market-leading ways, but they are slowly giving ground in the overall industry rankings.

Overall, the disk strorage industry continues to be the hottest sector of IT, with iSCSI products leading the way, the firm said. IDC's Brad Nisbet said there are a number of drivers for this growth, including the rapid increase in the volume of business data to such projects as consolidation and virtualization.

ISCSI continues to prove its popularity in the market, ending 2007 on the upswing with revenue growth of 70 percent, said IDC analyst Liz Conner.

Resource Library:

EMC leads the world's total external disk market with 22 percent share, followed by IBM at 17.7 percent and HP at 12.3 percent. However, EMC's growth in the quarter was 13.3 percent, compared to 5.6 percent for IBM and 2.1 percent for HP. 

In contrast, NetApp, which owns 7.5 percent of the market, grew by 19.3 percent during the quarter, Hitachi by 15.5 percent and Dell by 15 percent.

EMC maintained its lead in the total network storage market with 27.8 percent revenue share, followed by IBM and HP with 15.4 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively.

In the total worldwide disk storage systems market (internal and external), IBM leads the market with 22.9 percent, followed by HP with 18.1 percent. EMC maintained the third position with 16 percent. However, Sun Microsystems showed the most growth in this sector (16 percent), with Hitachi (14.9 percent) right behind.

"Dell and NetApp appear to really be focusing well, and it's paying off," Nisbet told eWEEK. "They've been showing double-digit growth for several quarters now, and it's paying off in increased market share. Dell especially appears to be done with its preparation and is now just going out and selling its storage products. It's been impressive."

However, while some companies such as Sun continue to grow, HP is struggling, Nisbet said.

"They have so many good products and services going for them, but I think they're still trying to determine how to message the market and their channel partners about all of them," Nisbet said. "They're not executing as well as they have in the past. They've tried to leverage the synergies between their server and storage lines, and there are many. But they haven't delivered the message well. The market needs to see if HP can bring all of what they have together."