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Here’s more evidence that the data storage business, at least to this point, is unaffected by the U.S. economic downturn that started earlier this year.
Researcher Gartner reported Dec. 9 that worldwide external controller-based disk storage revenue totaled $4.3 billion in the third quarter of 2008 — a full 10 percent increase over the same period in 2007.
Last week, competing researcher and IT newsmaker IDC reported that third-quarter factory revenues in external disk storage posted growth of 8.8 percent year over year, totaling $4.9 billion.
So there is reason for most of the storage business to remain confident looking ahead to 2009 — despite all the free-falls in other sectors of the economy. There’s always going to be a need for places to put data, and the deluge of data bits isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
In today’s Gartner report, the usual suspects went one-two-three in market leadership: EMC maintained the No. 1 spot overall, finishing the quarter at 26.1 percent market share, IBM was second with 13 percent of the market, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 11.3 percent.
NetApp showed the highest growth year over year at 21.1 percent, showing strong growth in the FAS2000 Series. Dell had the next highest growth with 12.6 percent. Also recording double-digit growth was EMC with 11.7 percent and Hitachi Data Systems at 10.7 percent. Sun Microsystems grew by 6.1 percent, which is a bright spot in that struggling company’s overall financial picture.