Disk storage market powers up

Gartner figures reveal double-digit growth in external controller-based disk storage market in Q2

Revenue in the ECB disk storage market are up 20 per cent on last year

Revenues within the global external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market were up 20 per cent on last year during the second quarter of 2010.

According to figures from analyst house Gartner, ECB disk storage market revenues topped $4.6bn in Q2 2010, up from $3.8bn during 2009.

Gartner has attributed the growth to the trend towards desktop and server virtualisation deployments, as well as the modernisation of the technology used in backup and data recovery products.

The findings also revealed that EMC led the market with year-on-year revenue growth of 27.8 per cent to $1.2bn, and market share gains of four per cent.

The analyst house said EMC’s Q2 performance had been bolstered by the storage vendor’s acquisition of Data Domain in June 2009.

NetApp also performed strongly, with revenues up 60 per cent on last year to $516m, while its share of the market grew by nearly three per cent.

Meanwhile, HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle and Hitachi Data Systems all saw their share of the market decline by between 0.3 and one per cent.

Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner, said: "Users continue to favour the more cost-effective modular ECB disk storage systems over monolithic ECB disk storage systems."