Report: Disk Storage Systems Grow Nearly 10 PercentReport: Disk Storage Systems Grow Nearly 10 Percent

The worldwide disk storage systems market continue its robust growth in the second quarter, chalking up year over year gains of 9.9 percent to reach the $5.6 billion mark, according to survey figures released Friday by IDC.

Revenue growth was dwarfed by capacity as total disk storage system petabyte figures grew nearly 60 percent year over year, reaching 457 petabytes for the quarter.

All four of the market leaders had something to cheer about: Hewlett-Packard led the worldwide total disk storage systems factor revenue figure with $1.3 billion (23.5 percent share of market) and EMC held onto the top spot in the external disk storage systems market with $807 million for a 21.2 percent market share in the category.

The market research firm said factory revenue in the external disk storage systems market grew 8.6 percent year over year to hit the $3.8 billion level.

IBM was elated to gain market share over arch-rival EMC. According to IDC, IBM recorded $527 in revenue for the quarter accounting for a 13.4 percent year over year revenue growth that was good enough for a 13.8 percent share of market – up from 13.2 percent in the previous year’s quarter.

“On the enterprise disk front alone, IBM grew 24 percent year to year while EMC declined 3 percent year to year,” IBM crowed in an e-mail.

EMC was pleased with its top 40.2 percent market share position in the NAS category. Network Appliance’s 35.2 percent market share percentage put the firm in the second place NAS sector.

A relative newcomer to the disk storage systems market, Dell Computer moved into the fourth place position ahead of Hitachi, recording an 8.3 percent revenue share. Dell logged the most impressive surge in growth, jumping 27.1 percent year over year.

“The top five vendors accounted for almost 70 percent of the external disk storage systems market – up from 68 percent a year ago,” said Natalya Yezhkova, senior research analyst, IDC Storage Systems, in a statement. “Four of the top five vendors gained market share benefiting from the success of their midrange products.” Hitachi slipped from 8 percent to 7.3 percent in market share and its revenues declined slightly from $281 in the previous year’s quarter to $278 million.

The market research firm said EMC’s 27.9 percent market share led the total network storage market, which it defined as NAS combined with Open and iSCSI SAN. HP had 21.3 percent while Dell and IBM each logged substantial gains in the category with Dell growing 32.2 percent and IBM 22.9 percent.