Storage Growth Doesn’t Stop For Breath

December 4th, 2006: Factory revenues for the worldwide disk storage market have grown by almost 10% in the last year and show no signs of slowing any time soon.

Business data just keeps on growing exponentially, and naturally hardware is needed to not only house all these 1’s and 0’1, but keep them available and the business breathing. According to IDC, this 9.9 percent growth in factory revenues in Q3 of 2006 mark the 14th consecutive quarter of growth, and bring the total disk storage systems market to US$6.2 billion. Up 7.9 percent compared to the same time last year.

The analysts have also found that for the first time the total disk storage capacity shipped has hit 783 petabytes, a 50.2 percent jump from last year.

“There was a marked increase in average size and selling price for disk storage systems in the third quarter, particularly for systems selling between US$50,000 and US$300,000,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager with IDC's Storage Systems Program. “IDC believes these larger systems are being fueled by a variety of drivers, including the consolidation that results from increased server virtualization, branch office consolidation, and a new wave of organizations looking to store vast amounts of fixed content.

IDC’s storage tracker put EMC at the head of the external disk storage market in terms of revenue gains, rising from $786 million in 2005 to $927 million in 2006. The company’s market share also grew from 20 percent in 2005 to 21.4 percent this year.

HP took out second place again with its share retreating from 19 to 17.6 percent. Conversely it managed to increase revenue by US$14 million to $760 million last year. IBM held third place with a market share of 13.7 percent, up 0.6 percent from last year. IBM’s revenues are also up, recording US$591 million compared to US$517 million last year.

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