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It looks like the recession of the last two years may be in the rear-view mirror for the data storage business.
Industry analyst IDC said June 4 in its Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker that worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues totaled $5 billion and posted a robust year-over-year growth of 17.1 percent in the first quarter of 2010.
Total disk storage systems-a combination of all internal and external drives sold-came in at $6.7 billion in revenues, an 18.8 percent improvement from the 2009 first quarter, IDC said.
That category marks the closest competition among the vendors for market share, with EMC ($1.22 billion, 18.2 percent market share) barely edging out Hewlett-Packard ($1.21 billion, 18.0 percent) for first place in the quarter.
IBM ($955 million, 14.2 percent), Dell ($852 million, 12.7 percent) and NetApp ($550 million, 8.2 percent) round out the world’s top five.
Total capacity of disk storage systems shipped in the first three months of 2010 reached 3,397 petabytes-a whopping 55.2 percent upsurge over 2009, IDC said.
Among individual external disk vendors, EMC maintained its No. 1 position with 24.6 percent revenue share ($1.2 billion) in the first quarter, followed by IBM ($579 million) and NetApp ($550 million) with 11.7 percent and 11.1 percent market share, respectively. HP ($482 million) and Dell ($410 million) rounded out the world top five with 10.2 percent and 10.1 percent market share, respectively.
Starting in Q3 2009, EMC is reported as the combined entity of EMC and Data Domain, IDC said.
IDC said the total open networked disk storage market-NAS combined with open/iSCSI SAN-grew by 26.3 percent year over year in the first quarter to $4 billion in revenues. In that segment, EMC holds the top position with 28.7 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp with 13.7 percent.
In the Open SAN market, which IDC said grew 20.3 percent in a year, EMC was the leading vendor with 22.2 percent share, followed by IBM and HP with 14.0 percent and 13.5 percent share, respectively.
NAS, iSCSI SAN markets remain hot
The NAS market grew by 44.6 percent over 2009, IDC said, led by EMC with 45.1 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp with 26.9 percent.
The iSCSI SAN market also showed momentum, posting 45.7 percent revenue growth compared with the prior year’s quarter, IDC said. Dell led that market with 36.9 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp with 14.4 percent.
“The worldwide disk storage systems market is off to a strong start in Q1 2010, based on year-over-year growth, although annual comparisons are less indicative of market performance given the 2009 economic crisis,” said Natalya Yezhkova, a research manager in storage systems at IDC.
“As such, sequential comparisons can provide more information on a market recovery. Although the market declined in Q1 2010 compared to Q4 2009, the decline was lower than usual. This is a positive sign, suggesting increased storage budgets and continued demand for storage solutions.”