Disk Storage Sales And Capacity Both Up in Q2

Published: September 19, 2011

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There's no shortage to the amount of digital junk that we want to keep, just in case it might be useful some day, and because of this, the disk array business continues to see both revenue and capacity shipment growth grow even as disk subsystems get more efficient at storing data.

In the second quarter, the analysts at IDC reckon that total disk array revenues rose by 10.2 percent to $7.49 billion while aggregate capacity rose by a stunning 46.7 percent to 5,353 petabytes. Sales of external disk arrays--the kind used by most midrange and high-end servers--rose by 12.2 percent to $5.64 billion.

The big winners in the storage racket are EMC and NetApp, which are growing their disk storage revenues more than twice as fast as the overall market. EMC had 26 percent growth in the quarter, to $1.62 billion in sales, giving it the number one spot, while NetApp grew by 25.7 percent, to $720 million, giving that company the number five spot. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell filled out positions two through four (in that order), and were all helped substantially by recent storage acquisitions. HP matched the overall market growth and pulled in $1.44 billion in disk array sales in Q2, follow by IBM, which didn't match the pace of the market, rising only 8.1 percent to $1.16 billion. Dell's disk revenues were off one-tenth of a percent, mainly because its acquired EqualLogic, Compellent, and DX Object Storage product lines could not make up for plummeting sales of EMC products in the wake of that partnership unraveling.

On the storage software front, add-ons for disk arrays plus file systems and archiving software are growing more or less in lockstep with disk array sales, according to IDC. In the second quarter, this lump of storage software accounted for $3.37 billion, up 11.3 percent year-on-year. This is the gravy in the storage racket, much as operating systems are for the server business. EMC had the biggest haul in storage software in Q2, with $827 million (up 14.5 percent). Symantec, which bought file system maker Veritas a few years back for an outrageous amount of money, came in second with $533 million in storage software (up 9.2 percent). IBM was third, with $477 million (up 9.4 percent), followed by NetApp with $298 million in sales (up only five-tenths of a point).

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