IDC says server-based storage sales are soaring – and Dell's pwning the market

IDC’s latest quarterly storage tracker shows EMC clawing back some lost ground, HP growing, IBM overtaking NetApp – and Dell selling the most storage capacity of all.

IDC Storage Tracker, Q2, 2015

The research house tracks vendor and original design manufacturer (ODM) storage market shares based on revenue and it publishes a quarterly report, including a chart (above), showing how vendor shares have changed.

Looking at external disk storage IDC says: “EMC was the largest external storage systems supplier during the quarter with 29.9 per cent of worldwide revenues. IBM, NetApp, and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie* for the second largest ranking with revenue shares of 11.1 per cent , 10.9 per cent and 10.5 per cent , respectively. Dell and Hitachi were also a statistical tie [in 5th place] with the two companies earning 6.6 per cent and 6.5 per cent of worldwide external storage revenues during the quarter.”

Dell is, and remains, number 1 in total storage capacity shipped terms, looking at both external and internal storage. We understand Dell shipped 3.6 exabytes of data, more than NetApp, IBM and Hitachi combined (3.05 EB). EMC shipped 2.56 EB.

IDC says of the NAS and SAN categories: “The total open networked disk storage market (NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN) generated $5bn in revenue during the quarter. EMC maintained its leadership in the total open networked storage market with 32.4 per cent revenue share. NetApp generated 12.3 per cent of revenue within this market segment.”

The external disk storage systems market declined 3.9 per cent from the second quarter of 2014 to 2015’s second quarter. All vendors in IDC’s report declined more than this, except HP which saw an 0.2 per cent rise and Hitachi which only declined 1.9 per cent. The biggest faller was NetApp (19.6 per cent) followed by IBM (11.4 per cent) and Dell (9.9 per cent.) The Others category saw a 9.3 per cent rise.

IDC points out: “Sales of server-based storage were up 10 per cent [year over year] during the quarter and accounted for $2.1bn in revenue.” External storage accounted for $5.7bn in revenue and “total capacity shipments were up 37 per cent year over year to 30.3 exabytes during the quarter.” ®

Bootnote

* IDC defines a statistical tie when there is less than one per cent difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors.