EMC Continues To Outperform Disk Market

Storage capacity growth continues to outpace storage revenue growth, but both turned in strong performances for the third quarter of 2011, according to IDC. External disk storage system factory revenues came in at just under $5.8 billion, up 10.8% year over year, while the total disk storage systems market grew 8.5% to $7.6 billion. IDC reports total disk storage systems capacity shipped grew 30.7% year over year, to 5,429 petabytes.

According to a prepared statement from Liz Conner, senior research analyst, storage systems, the third quarter was a strong one for enterprise storage, signalling a return to business as normal. "The trend of increased spending during the economic recovery period, specifically on high-end systems, has started to draw to a close. As IDC predicted, year-over-year growth has started to slow and is now approaching pre-economic crisis levels."

NAS combined with open/iSCSI SAN, the open networked disk storage market, grew 12.3% to almost $4.9 billion, with EMC (31.3%) accounting for almost a third of the revenues. NetApp came in second, with a 14.4% revenue share. EMC also took top spot in the open SAN market, up 16.1% to 25.3% revenue share, followed by IBM and HP with 15.4% and 14.0% share, respectively.

Although the NAS market only grew 3.5% year over year, EMC held an even bigger share (46.7%), followed by NetApp with 30.9%. Shooting up 19.5% year over year, the iSCSI SAN market was dominated by Dell (30.3%), followed by EMC (19.2%) and HP (14.0%).

IDC says strong growth in the midrange segment ($50K to $149.99K) helped the overall growth in the quarter. It adds that the trend to buy modular systems offering enterprise-level functionality--such as scale-out architectures, tiering and data deduplication--continues.

Overall, EMC continued its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 28.6% revenue share, followed by IBM and NetApp with 12.7% and 12.1%, respectively. HP held down fourth place with 11.3%, while Hitachi (8.8%) and Dell (8.0%) rounded out the top six vendors that accounted for 81.5% of the market.

For the total disk market, EMC held top spot (21.7%), followed by HP (18.9%), IBM (14.8%), Dell (11.6%) and NetApp (9.2%). Collectively, the top six performers represented 76.2% of total factory revenues in the third quarter.

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