Data storage costs take another tumble

Factory revenues for external disk storage systems grew 3.5 per cent year-on-year to $3.4bn in the third quarter, according to data released by IDC this week.

This is the sixth consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth, IDC said. The total disk storage systems market grew year-over-year as well, climbing 2.1 per cent. Storage capacity also increased, by 50.5 per cent year-on-year to 310 petabytes (310 million gigabytes) - the largest growth rate over the past seven quarters.

EMC claimed the number one spot with 21.2 per cent of revenue share in the external disk storage systems market, posting a 17.4 per cent year-on-year gain in revenue during the quarter.

Second place HP, which had 19 per cent of the market, saw revenue dip 7.5 per cent year-on-year. IBM came in third with 13.1 per cent market share. Network Appliance posted the strongest year-on-year revenue growth during the third quarter, with 24.6 per cent growth, IDC said.

EMC was also on top in the total networked storage market with 28.9 per cent revenue share, followed by HP, with 23.3 per cent, and IBM, with 11.5 per cent. For the top ranking in the Open/iSCSI SAN market, HP and EMC differed by only 0.2 per cent, the market researcher said.

IDC attributed the growth in the external disk storage market to increased adoption of entry and midrange networked storage, which it defines as storage priced below $150,000 per system. The top vendors introduced external storage systems and solutions targeted to specific customer and application segments during the third quarter.

In the network attached storage, or NAS, market, which grew 14.3 per cent over the third quarter of 2003, Network Appliance led with 36.3 per cent revenue share, followed by EMC with 34.8 per cent share. HP was in the top position in the total global disk storage systems market with 23.6 per cent revenue share, while IBM was in the second place with 20.6 per cent share.

"We are encouraged to see continued growth in disk storage systems, despite the lower rate when compared to previous quarters," Brad Nisbet, program manager at IDC, said in a statement. "Conversely, we saw an increase in the growth of petabytes shipped, which is yielding the largest dollar per gigabyte pricing decline in seven quarters and points to a growing share of higher-capacity, lower-cost disk drive deployments and a broader variety of products offered by the major vendors."