IDC Projects Disk Array Capacity to Keep Exploding Through 2010

Published: June 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the server market is showing some signs, once again, of slowing down, the disk storage market doesn't seem to be showing any breathlessness. According to the projections cooked up by the analysts at IDC, we can expect the appetite for disk storage to continue unabated through 2010.

According to those projections, the amount of terabytes shipped each year between 2005 and 2010 will grow, on average, 50 percent a year, which is just a staggering amount of capacity. This is more or less the rate that disk capacity shipments have been growing for as long as anyone can remember. IDC is also projecting that disk storage sales will continue to grow, even with huge capacity increases on disk drives, with sales projected to hit $29.8 billion worldwide (for both internal and external arrays) by 2010. What IDC did not say in its report is that while total worldwide disk sales grew by 10.5 percent in 2005 to hit $23.7 billion, that $29.8 billion figure for 2010's disk storage sales implies an average revenue growth rate of only 4.7 percent between now and 2010. Curves being what they are, that would also seem to imply that revenue growth should be flat by 2010, since nothing in this world grows or declines linearly.

IDC said that over two-thirds of the storage capacity shipped by 2010 will be based on so-called "capacity-oriented" disk drives, by which IDC means really fat disks. IDC also said that it expects sales of iSCSI-based storage area networks to grow from the piddling levels in 2005 to hit $5.1 billion in sales by 2010.