Economic Crisis Fails to Dampen Storage Market Growth

December 9, 2008: IDC has released new storage research that illustrates strong growth in the external disk storage system market, despite the economic slowdown.

It will apparently take a lot more than just a mere worldwide financial crisis to put a dent in the storage market, with IDC reporting that external disk storage systems factory revenues posted an 8.8 percent year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2008, totalling US$4.9 (AU$7.38) billion.

According to the research firm’s Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, for the quarter, the total disk storage systems market grew to US$6.6 (AU$9.94) billion in revenues, up 1.1 percent from Q3 2007, driven by softness in server systems sales.

IDC says that the total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 2,170 petabytes, growing 41.7 percent year over year.

“While the economic turmoil has already started impacting spending in various IT segments, including PCs and server systems, the market for external disk storage systems remained in stable condition with solid year-over-year growth,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research manager, storage systems research at IDC. “Numerous IDC surveys of IT users suggest that storage is one of a few hardware categories where buyers are reluctant to cut spending independent of the economic situation.”

“At the same time, current market conditions and tightening budgets are leading to longer purchasing cycles for storage systems and to the adoption of technologies designed to optimise storage utilisation and/or reduce total cost of ownership.”

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