Video content fuels storage growth

The market for external disk storage systems grew in the third quarter of 2006 by 9.9 percent, according to the latest figures from market analyst, IDC. The total market for disk systems grew only slightly more slowly by 7.9 percent.

Of the major vendors, only HP disappointed slightly, growing only 1.8 percent in the market for external disks and only 4.7 percent, the lowest, in the total storage market.

But the slight hiccups did not mar the results from what has proved a boom period for storage suppliers. The 9.9 percent growth in the quarter from a year ago amounted to $4.3bn and marked 14 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth, IDC said.

Perhaps the real indicator of how much storage is growing — fuelled on one hand by legal requirements on storage, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and on the other by the boom in video — was that the total disk capacity shipped increased by 50.2 percent over the previous quarter, to 783 petabytes.

EMC led the market for external disk storage in the quarter with 21.4 percent of the revenue, closely followed by HP with 17.6 percent of revenue share. IBM maintained the third position with 13.7 percent, and Dell and Hitachi almost tied for fourth spot with 8 percent and 7.9 percent respectively. Among the top five vendors, EMC and IBM were the only two suppliers with double-digit year-over-year growth.

The total network disk storage market (NAS combined with Open SAN) showed 17.2 percent year-over-year growth in the quarter to more than $3bn. EMC continues to maintain its leadership in the total network storage market with 27.1 percent market share, followed by HP with 17.9 percent and IBM with 12.5 percent.

The Open SAN market also grew fast by 17.3 percent year over year, with EMC regained the number-one position from HP with 24.4 percent of revenue share, followed by HP with 21 percent.