IDC Reports More Double-Digit Growth in Disk Storage Market

Worldwide sales of disk-based storage arrays, which leveled off only briefly during the last two years of a difficult macroeconomy, climbed a healthy 21 percent in the second quarter of 2010 over the same period a year ago, industry researcher IDC reported Sept. 3.

For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market grew to $6.8 billion in revenues, representing 20.7 percent growth from 2009's second quarter. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped amounted to 3,645 petabytes-a whopping 54.6 percent upsurge over a year ago.

Factory revenues totaled slightly more than $5 billion in Q2, as reported in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

"It's the story of growth," Liz Conner, IDC senior research analyst in Storage Systems and Personal Storage, told eWEEK. "We're still seeing good growth in the disk storage systems market, which is not always guaranteed in the IT market anymore, given the uncertain state of the economy.

"As for the magnitude of the growth, some of that is due to the fact that it was a relatively easy year-over-year compare. Q2 2009 was pretty much the bottoming out of the disk storage market during the recession. That fact helps make Q2 2010 look rather good."

Conner said IDC found quarter-over-quarter growth of 1.1 percent for total storage factory revenue.

"Although this might seem small, given the renewed fear of a double-dip recession and a strong Q1, the fact that we're seeing growth (both Y/Y and Q/Q) is still a very positive sign," Conner said.

EMC kept its long-term lead in the external disk storage systems market with 25.7 percent revenue share in the second quarter, followed by IBM with 13.6 percent market share. NetApp and HP are basically tied for third place with 11.4 percent and 11.3 percent market share, respectively. Dell was fifth with 9.4 percent market share.
 
The total open networked disk storage market (NAS combined with Open/iSCSI SAN) grew 29.2 percent year over year in the second quarter to $4.2 billion in revenues. EMC continues to lead in this category with 28.9 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp at 13.6 percent.

In the Open SAN market, which grew 21.8 percent year over year, EMC was the leading vendor with 21.8 percent revenue share, followed by IBM in second and HP in third with 15.9 percent and 14.8 percent, respectively.

The NAS market grew an impressive 51.1 percent year over year, led by EMC with 45.6 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp with 25.2 percent.

iSCSI SAN market continues strong momentum

The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 49.0 percent revenue growth compared with the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 32.9 percent revenue share, followed by HP, NetApp and EMC, all in a statistical tie for second, with 14.2 percent, 13.4 percent and 13.3 percent market share, respectively.

"As for the future ... we're seeing data creation rates that really bring the need for storage to the forefront of an IT administrator's agenda," Conner said. "However, IDC also expects to see an uptick in storage efficiency software. Items such as thin provisioning, deduplication, etc., that help one store more in a given space will be increasingly utilized.

"Down the line this might shift some of the emphasis of storage from the hardware capacity to the software efficiency, but overall, we expect there to be a healthy demand for storage in the future."