Global Revenue From External Storage Falls In 4Q

Worldwide factory revenue from external disk storage systems fell in the fourth quarter of 2008, marking the first drop in more than five years, a market research firm said Friday.

Year-over-year revenue in the quarter fell by 0.5% to $5.3 billion, IDC said. Total disk storage systems market revenue fell 5.9% to $7.3 billion, driven by weakness in server system sales. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 2,460 PB, growing 27.3% year over year.

"Because of the global economic crisis, the last quarter of 2008 was tough for the disk storage systems market," IDC researcher Natalya Yezhkova said in a statement.

Among the vendors, EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with a 23.3% share, followed by IBM and Hewlett-Packard with 15.7% and 13%, respectively, IDC said. Dell was fourth with a 9.3% share and Hitachi and NetApp finished the quarter in a statistical tie for fifth with 7.8% and 7%, respectively.

Among the top five vendors, Dell and HP posted the strongest growth rates of 10% and 5.8%, respectively, IDC said.

Revenue from network disk storage fared better in the quarter than external disk storage, rising 3.6% year over year to more than $4.1 billion in revenue. EMC maintained its lead in the network storage market with a 28.6% share, followed by IBM with 14.5%.

Weak server system sales drove the drop in total revenue from disk storage systems. Market researcher Gartner this week reported that worldwide server shipments and revenue fell 11.7% and 15.1%, respectively, in the fourth quarter. The top five vendors based on worldwide revenue all experienced a decline in sales.

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