IDC Finds Strong Growth in External Disk Storage

June 8, 2007: IDC has released the latest results from its Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Tracker, finding strong growth with factory revenues jumping by US$239 million in the first quarter of 2007 to start with.

The result marks a 5.9 percent growth from last year’s US$4.3 billion, while the total disk storage systems market grew to US$6.1 billion up 7.2 percent last year.

1,000 petabytes worth of capacity was also shipped for the second consecutive quarter, a growth of 60 percent on last year’s figures.

IDC program manager Brad Nisbet claims that sales of external storage systems costing under US$50,000 is the predominate driver behind this quarter’s strong growth.

“After several quarters of impressive growth in 2006 for midrange and high-end systems selling with average prices above $50,000, we saw only modest gains in these systems this quarter. The growth in lower-end products indicates opportunity across the board as customers continue to invest in a broad spectrum of available storage solutions,” said Nisbet.

EMC kept its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 21.2 percent share of revenue, followed by HP and IBM in a statistical tie for the number 2 position with 13.4 percent and 12.7 percent share, respectively. Dell and Hitachi rounded out the top 5 (in another statistical tie) with 8.9 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively.

For network disk storage systems, the market experienced a 14.3 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter to more than $3.0 billion. EMC continued its lead here as well, with a 26.9 percent share of revenue, followed again by HP and IBM with 13.5 percent and 11.4 percent respectively.

“External direct-attached storage continues to decline, being cannibalised primarily by network storage systems," said IDC Storage Systems research manager Natalya Yezhkova. “The other threat to external DAS is coming from internal storage that grew at 10.5percent in the first quarter of 2007. Developments in the server market, including server virtualization and the adoption of multi-core processors, has lead to deployments of servers with larger storage capacity, thus adding to the decline in external DAS.”

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