Storage Earnings Going Nowhere but Up, Up and Away

The Station never fails to be amazed at the amount of money being made throughout this sector.

EMC on Wednesday, April 23, turned in a report card showing a cool $3 billion in quarterly revenue — a good deal of profit included. Hewlett-Packard’s Enterprise Storage and Servers division reported Q1 revenue of $4.8 billion, up 9 percent over the prior-year period — fueled by its new storage blades, which grew 81 percent in revenue.

NetApp is expected to report good things on May 21. Storage divisions of Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Sun Microsystems should post good numbers this quarter, too.

A few more storage sector earnings news bits from this week:

—Data Domain, of Santa Clara, Calif., saw its revenue for Q1 FY08 rise to $52.6 million, an increase of 17 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 and a cool $5 million more than Wall Street projections. The company’s revenues increased 160 percent from Q1 FY07 to Q1 FY08.

—FalconStor, of Melville, N.Y., reported 33 percent growth over Q107 ($21 million vs. $16 million) and a whopping 306 percent growth in operating income over a year ago. Looks like its OEM deals with Sun Microsystems and others are going quite well.

–Hard drive maker Western Digital, of Lake Forest, Calif., reported a bang-up Q1, bringing in $2.11 billion — $600,000 over Wall Street projections.

–Hard drive maker Seagate Technology, of Scotts Valley, Calif., reported a full 10 percent rise in revenues for its Q3 to $3.10 billion from $2.83 billion in the prior year quarter.

How long can this continue? Indefinitely, we’re told. The increase in the amount of data being stored isn’t slowing down one iota.