Disk Storage Market Booming

September 5th, 2006: IDC’s worldwide disk storage tracker has recorded a second quarter growth in external disk storage system revenue of 8.5%, bringing the total to US$4.2 billion.

This marks the 13th consecutive quarter of growth, but is by no means an unlucky or unusual number, with the total disk storage systems market growing with it by 6% to US$5.9 billion.

Total capacity shipped also topped 704 petabytes, 51.5% more than the same period last year. Something that Brad Nisbet from IDC Storage Systems says is due to vendors offering more flexible storage solutions.

“Disk storage systems vendors have invested heavily to expand their product offerings - most of the major vendors now have systems to address a wide range of application, capacity, and performance requirements,” says Nisbet. “As such, the disk storage systems market as a whole is well-poised to satisfy the expected data growth associated with an expanding set of customer needs.”

As for sharing the pie, EMC and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie leading the external disk storage systems market with 20.0% and 19.3% revenue share, respectively. IBM followed with 13.2% while Hitachi, Dell, and Sun rounded out the top six with another statistical tie of 8.0%, 7.8%, and 7.1%.

On the network disk storage front (NAS and Open SAN), the market experienced an 11.4% year-over-year growth in the first quarter to reach more than US$2.8 billion. Here EMC continues dominate the total network storage market with 26.2% of revenue, followed by HP and IBM with 21.1% and 11.6% revenue share, respectively.

The Open SAN market grew by 10.3% year over year, while the NAS market grew 16.2% year over year. HP is currently top dog of Open SAN with a 25.0% share of revenue, followed by EMC with 23.0%, however, EMC leads the NAS market with 38.5%, followed by Network Appliance with 32.6%.

IDC says that the iSCSI SAN market is also continuing to show strong momentum, posting 72.8% revenue growth compared to the same period last year and surpassing $100 million for first time. Network Appliance continues to lead this market with 27.6% share, followed by EMC with 25.0 %.

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