EMC increases stranglehold on external disk market

Market worth a record-breaking $24.7bn in 2012, according to IDC

EMC led the way in the external global disk storage systems market in 2012's fourth quarter, according to IDC, which claims the vendor's annual revenue jumped the most out of the top five vendors.

For the three months to 31 December, EMC's total worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenue jumped 7.5 per cent to $2.1bn (£1.4bn) annually, while its market share rose 2.2 points to 30.7 per cent over the same period.

For the quarter, the total external disk storage systems market generated $6.7bn revenue, growing 2.3 per cent compared to the same period in 2011.

IDC described the final quarter for the external disk storage systems market as solid and said it contributed to a record-breaking full-year revenue figure of $24.7bn.

Eric Sheppard, research director of storage at IDC, said: "FICON [fibre connection] attached array sales and network attached storage (NAS) both helped drive the factory revenue increase during the quarter as companies invested in storage required to support mainframe environments and to deal with the continued growth in unstructured data."

For Q4, NetApp was the only other top-five vendor to significantly increase its annual revenue figure in the external disk storage systems market, growing sales 6.3 per cent to $780m when compared to the same period in 2011. Despite this, NetApp's market share dropped 1.2 points year on year to 11.6 per cent, ranking it in third place below IBM.

IBM's Q4 external disk revenue grew 1.3 per cent year on year, taking the figure to $1bn. The vendor also upped its market share annually by 2.8 points to 15 per cent over the same period.

HP and Hitachi were statistically tied in terms of their Q4 market share, taking 9.3 per cent and 8.8 per cent respectively. IDC declares a tie if there is less than one percentage point between firms.

HP's Q4 external disk revenue sales fell 7.4 per cent year on year to $626m, while Hitachi's dropped 1.7 per cent to $590m over the same period.

The figures form part of IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems (DSS) Tracker, which defines a DSS as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and in some instances host bus adapters, associated with three or more disks.