Fastest growth in external storage for two years
Fastest growth in external storage for two years
Gartner has reported that external disk storage system revenues grew worldwide by 8.4 percent to US$3.7 billion during the last quarter of 2003. The external storage market also grew faster than the internal storage during that quarter.
HP is still the market leader in the external storage systems arena with 21.7 percent of the share, but EMC follows closely behind with 20 percent and IBM with 16.8 percent.
Hitachi and Dell were also in the top 5 with 7.4 percent and 6.4 percent of the market share respectively. Out of the top 5, EMC and Dell recorded the biggest year on year growth during the last quarter of 2003.
External RAID storage systems accounted for 91 percent of the external storage systems market, with EMC taking 21.9 percent of the market share and HP with 20.8 percent.
John McArthur, group vice president of Storage research at IDC said. "The U.S. was the first to feel the downturn and is now leading in the recovery with a healthy 7 percent growth rate. Outside the U.S., much of the perceived growth is the result of a weakened dollar. However, we are at least seeing signs of stabilisation, which is an improvement over past quarters."
With the economic situation looking much healthier worldwide, there have been good reasons recently for companies to be cheerful, including last year's cut in price per megabyte of storage equipment. The price fell by about 30 to 35 percent.
Compliance rules, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have also sparked off an increase need for more storage.
As for total disk storage systems, Gartner reported that IBM and HP are both in the top spot for demand. HP and IBM had 25.6 percent and 25.4 percent of the market share respectively, with EMC third on 13.3 percent.
As for the full year, the total disk storage system market rose by 1 percent to US$19.8 bullion, with HP leading the market on 26.4 percent of the revenue. IBM and EMC were on 21.6 percent and 12.7 percent.
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