Gartner Posts a Way-Positive Q1 Storage Revenue Report

The industry market news was very good this week. Gartner came out with its quarterly storage industry market report June 4, and the double-digit, up-and-to-the-right numbers map pretty well with with IDC had earlier in the day.

Gartner, which doesn’t break the markets down in exactly the same way, said that worldwide external controller-based disk storage revenue in Q1 2010 grew 18.3 percent over the same period last year. IDC had external disk storage systems revenue up 17.1 percent.

Worldwide ECB revenue totaled $4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2010, up from $3.8 billion from Q1 2009. IDC counted $5 billion in sales for the external disk market in Q1.

Gartner said all major geographic regions except Japan grew in double-digit percentage points year-over-year, with North America jumping a remarkable 25.5 percent. That’s pretty impressive in face of the worldwide spending slowdown of 2008-09.

Pent-up demand for refreshes and the new, second- and third-generation better-efficiency storage systems are starting to catch on — that’s the main reason for the hike, Gartner said.

“The more cost-effective ECB disk storage systems that conform to the modular architecture continue to gain share, with the more expensive monolithic/frame-based ECB storage systems declining to 27.7 percent of the total ECB disk storage market in the first quarter of 2010,” noted Gartner research VP Roger Cox. “Year over year, raw terabyte shipments grew 65 percent in the first quarter of 2010, while the price per terabyte decreased 28.3 percent.”

The top four ECB vendors were EMC ($1.2 billion, 27.2 percent market share), IBM ($527 Million, 11.7 percent), NetApp ($469 million, 10.4 percent) and Dell ($437 million 9.7 percent).