Brisk sales of enterprise external disk storage systems gave vendors a bullish quarter to close out the 2005 fiscal year.
Revenues were pushed up by $708 million with a 17.9 percent growth from approximately one year ago to reach $4.7 billion in revenues in Q4 of 2005, according to IDCs Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker report released on March 2.
The total disk storage systems market swelled to $6.8 billion which accounts for a 13.1 percent jump from Q4 2004.
In terms of sheer size, total disk storage systems capacity shipped out to customers in Q4 of 2005 grew by 54.6 percent in one year to reach a total of 653PB (petabytes), according to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
Leading the pack in the external disk storage systems push last quarter was EMC with a revenue share of 20.6 percent. That figure was closely followed by Hewlett-Packard at 18 percent; IBM at 15.9 revenue share; and Dell and Hitachi, Ltd., with 9.2 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively.
However, Dell made a dent in the market by joining IBM as the two major storage vendors which posted the largest year-over-year revenue growth during Q4 2005. Dells revenue expanded with 54.2 percent growth while IBM gained 46.8 percent share.
According to the IDC report, the total network disk storage market—comprising NAS (network attached storage) with open and iSCSI SAN (storage area network) arenas—registered a 24.2 percent year-over-year growth last quarter to reach more than $3.1 billion.
EMC notched the top spot in the total network storage market with 26.9 percent revenue share. HP at 19.7 percent and IBM at 13.6 percent revenue share were next in line.
With a 39.5 percent revenue share, EMC also dominated the NAS market segment, which grew by 23.3 percent in one year. Network Appliance secured the second spot in the NAS market with a 31.8 percent share.
One area which many analysts predict could see big returns in 2006 is iSCSI. Those prognosticators were proved correct in Q4 2005 as iSCSI drew a whopping 130 percent revenue growth compared to the previous years Q4, which came in at $94 million.
NetApp has solid footing in the iSCSI race, according to IDC, through its 26.2 percent market-share, followed by EMC at 20.6 percent market share.