X
Tech

Firms rein in spending on high-end storage

Company spending on high-performance and resilient storage systems fell by 25 percent over the past year, according to analyst house IDC.
Written by Nick Heath, Contributor

Spending on storage is dropping worldwide, with global revenues from external storage systems falling by more than five percent year-on-year to $5.6bn during the first quarter of 2014.

Analyst house IDC blamed the fall on a 25 percent drop in company spending on high-performance/resilient storage systems — the likes of the IBM DS8000, EMC's VMAX and Hitachi's Virtual Storage Platform. IBM cited "substantial weakness in high-end storage" when its systems and technology unit's revenue fell 23 percent year-on-year during the first quarter.

"Other important contributors to the market decline include the mainstream adoption of storage optimisation technologies, a general trend towards keeping systems longer, economic uncertainty, and the ability of customers to address capacity needs on a micro and short-term basis through public cloud offerings," according to Eric Sheppard, research director for IDC Storage.

During the first quarter, the internal and external disk storage systems market generated $7.3bn in revenue, a decrease of 6.9 percent year-on-year and a quarterly decline of 17 percent. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped was 9.9 exabytes, growing 19.9 percent year-on-year.

EMC was the largest supplier of external storage systems, but its market share fell year-on-year. The company captured 29.1 percent of the external disk storage revenue during the quarter, which was down from 30.2 percent the previous year.

NetApp was the second largest supplier in the market, with 15.1 percent share of revenue, up from 14.8 percent in Q1 2013. HP, IBM, and Hitachi followed with shares of 8.8 percent, 8.8 percent and 8.7 percent respectively.

The total open networked disk storage market, NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN, fell 3.9 percent year-on-year to $4.9bn in revenue. EMC maintained its leadership in the total open networked storage market with 31.5 percent revenue share, but lost share compared to the 33.4 percent the company generated in Q1 2013.

NetApp was the second largest supplier with 17.3 percent share, followed by HP with 8.9 percent, IBM 8.6 percent, and Hitachi with 8.3 percent.

storage
Image: IDC
storage2
Image: IDC

Read more on storage

Editorial standards