Capacity and revenue both up in disk storage

Second quarter sees 9.9 per cent growth with Hewlett-Packard, IBM and EMC leading the way

Storage capacity growth overtook revenue growth in disk storage systems by 49.4 per cent to 457 petabytes during the second quarter, despite global revenue topping $5bn, according to figures from IDC.

The Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Tracker discovered that revenue grew by 9.9 per cent to $5.6bn, year-over-year. Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM and EMC topped the leader board with 23.5, 20.5 and 14.4 per cent revenue shares respectively.

Brad Nisbet, program manager for storage systems at IDC, said: “Storage continues to be an area filled with opportunity as many organisations become increasingly dependant on the value of their business information.”

James Ward, managing director of storage distributor Hammer, said: “People want more capacity and the cost of a gigabyte has dropped, so it’s not surprising that capacity has outpaced revenue,” he said.

EMC lead the external disk storage market with 21.2 per cent market share, followed by HP (18.8) and IBM (13.8). Dell grew its market share by 7.1 per cent to 8.3 per cent during the second quarter.

EMC also increased its revenue by $71m to $807m, compared with the same period last year. Earlier this month EMC reaffirmed its acquisitive strength with the purchase of

NAS storage vendor Rainfinity for $100m and vendor Maranti Networks for $5m (CRN, 29 August).

Natalya Yezhkova, senior research analyst at IDC, said: “Four of the top five vendors gained market share, benefiting from the successes of their mid-range products.”

In May a separate IDC tape storage report revealed that HP had maintained its dominance of the worldwide tape market last year.