Storage Sector Continues Strong Growth: IDC

The good financial news continues for the solid-as-a-rock data storage industry.
Global sales of disk-based storage arrays, which had grown only slightly during 2008 and 2009, posted another double-digit gain in the third quarter of 2010 following a 21 percent rise in the second quarter, industry researcher IDC reported Dec. 3.
Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted year-over-year growth of 19 percent, with the overall revenue coming just shy of $5.2 billion-about 74 percent of all digital storage sales-IDC said in its Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker report.
Total disk storage systems market grew to nearly $7 billion in revenues, IDC said-growth of 18.5 percent from the Q3 2009. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 4,299 petabytes, growing a whopping 65.2 percent year over year.
"Users are still making up for their reduced storage spending in 2009 as the third quarter recorded the fourth-highest revenues in a single quarter for external disk storage systems," IDC Senior Researcher for Storage Systems Liz Conner said.
"The increased investment by end users and vendors alike in iSCSI SAN and NAS [41.4 percent and 49.8 percent year-over-year growth, respectively] has helped fuel the overall growth, while easing budget constraints sparked a pickup in FC SAN and higher-end systems alike."
EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 26.1 percent revenue share in the third quarter, followed by IBM in second with 12.9 percent.
NetApp and HP came in with 11.6 percent and 11.1 percent market share, respectively. Dell was fifth with 9.1 percent.
Noting the recent acquisitions of 3PAR (by HP) and Isilon (by EMC), Conner said that for Q3 2010, 3PAR's and Isilon's shares in the total external disk storage systems market were 0.83 percent and 0.75 percent, respectively.
In the Open SAN market, which grew 18.5 percent over Q3 2009, EMC was the leading vendor with 23.0 percent revenue share, followed by IBM in second and HP in third with 15.5 and 14.3 percent share, respectively.
The NAS market grew substantially (50 percent year over year), led by EMC with 46.6 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp at 28.9 percent.
The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, Conner said, posting 41.4 percent revenue growth compared with the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 33.8 percent revenue share, followed by EMC and HP, with 13.8 percent and 13.7 percent market share, respectively.