Dell Leads Open Systems Storage Market

By Greg McNevin

June 30, 2008: Following gains across the board, Dell is claiming the open systems storage crown after capturing a 20.4 percent share of the open systems (Windows/Linux) external worldwide disk array storage market for the first time.

The company took the lead in iSCSI SANs during the first quarter of 2008 with a US$422 (AU$439) million share of the market in terms of revenue. To reach the top spot, Dell says its external controller-based storage revenue increased 21 percent year-over-year.

It has been said many times, but digital data is expanding at a rate faster than computer systems and those who manage them can reliably store, manage and protect it. Driven by digital content creation in all media, the proliferation of email and data sharing of all kinds, and increasingly stringent compliance regulations, the amount of data that needs to be stored by business and consumers alike is growing exponentially.

Dell claims it has shipped over 116 petabytes in external disk storage for Windows/Linux servers in Q1 this year. “That is an astounding amount of storage capacity,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell Enterprise Storage. As a comparison, it is estimated by some that the total printed matter contained by all U.S. academic research libraries equals only two petabytes.

Dell says it ships more 288 petabytes of total disk storage each week within all of its products – including servers, desktops, laptops and enterprise storage systems.

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