The outlook for the worldwide disk storage systems market continues to look promising after external disk storage systems factories posted nearly $6 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2012, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, according to IT research firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.
EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 30.4 percent revenue share in the second quarter, followed by IBM and NetApp in a statistical tie for second with 12.9 percent and 12.1 percent market share, respectively.
HP captured the No. 4 position with a 10.7 percent market share, while Hitachi (with 8.1 percent share) and Dell (with 7.8 percent) rounded out the top five in a statistical tie for fifth place. (IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide disk storage market when there is less than 1 percentage point difference in the factory revenue of two or more vendors.)
The total disk storage systems market posted just under $8.1 billion in revenue in the second quarter, representing 8 percent growth from the prior year’s second quarter. Total worldwide disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 6,667 petabytes, growing nearly a quarter (24.8 percent) year-over-year.
“The external disk storage system market continues to grow on a stable trajectory with factory revenue approaching $6 billion for the first time in the second quarter,” Liz Conner, senior research analyst with IDC’s storage systems division, said in a prepared statement. “Despite concerns regarding the global and regional economies, end users continue to invest in storage infrastructures. Helping to drive the worldwide market in Q2 was the double-digit growth in the emerging regions and strong demand for midrange storage.”
In the total open networked storage market, EMC continues to maintain its lead with 33.7 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp with a 14 percent revenue share. With just under $5.2 billion in revenue, the total open networked disk storage market (network-attached storage combined with Open / iSCSI storage-area network) experienced growth of 6.5 percent year-over-year in the second quarter. EMC was also the leading vendor in the Open SAN market (which grew 8 percent year-over-year) with 29.4 percent revenue share, followed by IBM in second place (15.2 percent share) and HP in third (12.8 percent share).
“The midrange storage class [average selling prices in the $25K to $249.99K range] grew faster than any other class, at 12.2 percent year-over-year growth, in the second quarter,” Amita Potnis, senior research analyst in IDC’s storage systems division, said in a press statement. “At 48.2 percent share of total worldwide external revenue in 2Q12, IDC expects that the midrange storage class will soon cross the 50 percent revenue share milestone. IDC believes that this class will be the fastest-growing class as vendors bring to market modular systems offering enterprise-level functionality such as compression, tiering, and data de-duplication at greater affordability.”