Gartner’s IT industry research confirmed March 8 what IDC had reported a few days ago: That the data storage hardware industry had a pretty darn good year in 2010.
In fact, Gartner went one up and declared 2010 the segment’s highest revenue-producing year ever, the only sector in all of IT to accomplish this in the last 12 months.
Gartner reported that the worldwide ECB (external controller-based) disk storage market exceeded its previous high set in 2008 by $1.4 billion in 2010. In total, ECB storage revenue hit the $19.4 billion mark in 2010, an 18.1 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $16.5 billion.
“Storage infrastructure modernization, expanded server and desktop virtualization projects, disk-based backup and archiving deployments, new file-oriented applications, and cloud-based service offerings are the engines that are propelling ECB disk storage vendor revenue growth,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner.
“Clearly, IT executives are showing a willingness to invest in new and modern ECB disk storage solutions that address complexity, reduce opex and improve utilization while satisfying demanding service-level agreements.”
Gartner noted that despite its 80 percent share of the overall market, it was significant that even though block-access ECB disk storage grew 14.9 percent over 2009 in 2010, the segment grew only 3.4 percent over 2008.
File-access ECB disk storage grew 36.2 percent in 2010 over 2009 and 37.6 percent over 2008, Gartner said.
EMC increased its worldwide ECB disk storage revenue market share to 28 percent in 2010 and 28.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. NetApp experienced the strongest growth among the top-tier vendors in 2010 with a revenue increase of 50.9 percent from 2009.