Video boom beefs up storage market

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

Of the major vendors, only HP disappointed slightly, growing just 1.8 per cent in the market for external disks and only 4.7 per cent, 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 per cent 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 per cent over the previous quarter, to 783 petabytes.

EMC led the market for external disk storage in the quarter with 21.4 per cent of the revenue, closely followed by HP with 17.6 per cent of revenue share. IBM maintained the third position with 13.7 per cent, and Dell and Hitachi almost tied for fourth spot with eight per cent and 7.9 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent market share, followed by HP with 17.9 per cent and IBM with 12.5 per cent.

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

Colin Barker writes for ZDNet UK