EMC, IBM Market Leaders in External Disk Storage Market, Report Says

According to research firm IDC, pockets of growth appeared in second quarter results for the enterprise storage systems market, although worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a decline of 18.3 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09), totaling $4.1 billion. The IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker also found total disk storage systems factory revenues fell to $5.7 billion, a decline of 18.7 percent from the prior year's second quarter, driven by continued weakness in server systems sales. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 2,345 petabytes, growing 15.2 percent year-over-year.

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 21.5 percent revenue share in the second quarter, followed by IBM with 14.9 percent revenue share. HP ended in the third position with 11.4 percent market share. Dell and NetApp finished the quarter in a statistical tie for fourth position with 9.8 percent and 8.9 percent revenue share, respectively. "While all vendors are down year over year, we are beginning to see several storage vendors whose external disk storage revenues are showing sequential (quarter-over-quarter) growth, indicating some stability beginning to take shape in the market," said IDC research manager for enterprise storage Steve Scully.

Liz Conner, and IDC research analyst in storage systems, said while the enterprise storage systems market continue to feel the impact of current economic conditions, posting its third straight year-over-year decline, certain “sweet spots” in the market continue to thrive. “iSCSI SAN and FC SAN both showed strong year-over-year growth of 57.2 percent and 66.8 percent, respectively, in the entry level price bands ($0K-$14.99K) as customers continue to demand enterprise level network storage at a more economically friendly price point,” she noted. “Similarly, midrange NAS (price band $15K-$49.99K) enjoyed solid year-over-year growth of 20.7 percent as file-level data generation continues to be a hot topic for many customers.”

The reported revealed the total network disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) declined 15.3 percent year over year in the second quarter to more than $3.2 billion in revenues. IDC noted EMC continues to maintain its leadership in the total network storage market with 26.0 percent revenue share, followed by IBM with 13.8 percent revenue share. In the total worldwide disk storage systems market, IBM and HP finished the second quarter in a statistical tie with 17.3 percent each followed by EMC with 15.7 percent market share.

In the Open SAN market, which declined 23.8 percent year over year, EMC also led with 23.1 percent revenue share. The NAS market declined 6.8 percent year over year, led by EMC with 38.7 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp with 26.1 percent share. The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 27.2 percent revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 35.3 percent revenue share, followed by EMC with 15.7 percent.