Gartner Charts External Disk Array Sales for Q2

Published: October 2, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Among other factors, compliance regulations, exploding data capacity requirements thanks to rich media, and the need to stage the storage of data across many different devices for high availability and performance are all contributing to the burgeoning sales of external disk arrays. The latest statistics from Gartner concerning external disk arrays sales in the second quarter of 2007 show that the appetite for storage in the data centers of the world has not been sated.

During the quarter, global sales of external disk arrays--what Gartner now calls external controller based disk storage--rose by 3.3 percent, to $3.7 billion. EMC expanded its market share, according to Garter, posting sales of $933.3 million, up 8.6 percent compared to the second quarter of 2006 and giving EMC a 25.2 percent share of external disk array sales. IBM's growth was about half that of EMC's in the quarter, rising by 4.4 percent to $549.7 billion in sales. A year ago, Gartner reckoned that Hewlett-Packard and IBM were neck-and-neck for the number two position, separated by a mere $300,000 in sales. But in the second quarter of this year, Gartner says that HP's external disk array sales dropped by 2.9 percent, causing HP to drop down to $511.2 million in sales. Dell, which has a development partnership with EMC that has Dell making and rebranding entry arrays designed by EMC, continued its phenomenal storage array growth in the quarter, rising by 25.1 percent to $339.5 million in sales worldwide. Hitachi's share of the pie, which does not include sales of midrange and high-end disk arrays that are sold on an OEM basis to HP and Sun Microsystems, rose by a meager 0.7 percent to $304.1 million.

Network Appliance, which makes network-attached storage arrays and is the leader in this space, outpaced the market at large, growing by 7.2 percent to $290.4 million in sales. Sun, which has been struggling in the disk market for as long as anyone can remember--a situation that has not been helped by myriad acquisitions over the years, including Encore and StorageTek, continued to get hammered in the external disk storage market. In the second quarter, Sun's sales in this area fell by 36.1 percent, to $176.2 million--despite the successes of the new "Thumper" X4500 storage servers that Sun is bragging about having a $100 million annual run rate. That said, without Thumper, this would have been a lot worse. If you take Sun out of the equation, the external disk array sales would have grown by 7 percent, not 3.3 percent. Other vendors in the space comprised $599.3 million in sales, up 8.2 percent.

In terms of geographies, sales in North America rose by 4.5 percent, while sales in the Asia/Pacific region were up 19 percent. While Gartner did not say anything about Europe, it doesn't take a genius to figure out something went wrong in Europe in the quarter when it came to external disk array sales. With a weak U.S. dollar making even modest sales in Europe based in pounds or euros seem better than they might otherwise look, it is amazing that Gartner didn't say anything about what is going on in Europe in its statement. I guess they are saving that information for the paying customers.

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