IDC: Disk Storage Revenues Level Off

Thanks to increasing price competitiveness among the sector’s vendors and pressure from the NAND flash business, hard disk storage market revenues have reached a levelling-off period – at least for the time being.

This is more evidence of the growing influence of solid-state storage in enterprise IT systems. IDC, in its Q2 2013 Disk Storage Systems Tracker report, said on 6 September that for the second consecutive quarter, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a year-over-year decline of about 1 percent, with sales totaling $5.9 billion (£4bn).

Storage market decline

For the quarter, the total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.7 billion in revenue, representing a 5 percent decline from the prior year’s second quarter and a slight sequential decline compared with the first quarter of 2013.

Capacity acquired was not affected by the revenue downturn. Data continues to be created at a breakneck pace, and it needs somewhere to reside. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 8.2 exabytes, growing 21.5 percent year over year.

“Once again, spending on disk systems varied considerably by region,” said Eric Sheppard, research director of Storage at IDC. “Emerging markets experienced increases in demand while spending within mature markets, including the United States, Western Europe, Canada and Japan, fell when compared to the same quarter a year ago.

“This reduced demand is creating a very competitive environment and a general deterioration in pricing, which seems to worsen market conditions.”

EMC increased its decade-long lead in the external disk storage systems market with 31.3 percent revenue share during the quarter, followed by NetApp and IBM in a statistical tie for the No. 2 position with 13.3 percent and 12.6 percent market share, respectively.

Hewlett-Packard was No. 4 with 10 percent market share, while Dell and Hitachi finished in a statistical tie for fifth with 7.6 percent and 7.1 percent market share, respectively.

Networked storage

The total open networked disk storage market (NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN) grew a mere 0.2 percent year over year during the quarter to about $5.2 billion in revenues. EMC led in the total open networked storage market with 34.1 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp with 15.2 percent revenue share.

In the open SAN market, which declined -0.6 percent year over year, EMC was the leading vendor with 29.7 percent revenue share, followed by IBM in second with 15 percent market share. HP and NetApp accounted for 13.0 percent and 9.5 percent of sales, respectively.

The NAS market increased 2.5 percent year over year, led by EMC with 46.3 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp with a 30.8 percent share.

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Originally published on eWeek.