IDC sees disk storage turning the corner 7 March, 2010 By Mark Cox

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Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a year-over-year decline of 0.7%, totaling $5.3 billion, in the fourth quarter of 2000. But considering IDC numbers show a 10.2% decline for the whole year, the Q4 numbers represent a significant uptick. For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market grew to $7.3 billion in revenues, representing 0.2% growth from the prior year's fourth quarter. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reach 3,304 petabytes, growing 33.4% year over year.

"Although 2009 might have gotten off to a rough start, it ended on a strong note," said Liz Conner, senior research analyst, Storage Systems, in a statement. "Total (internal plus external) factory revenue for the fourth quarter posted the first year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2008. Although Q4 is traditionally a strong quarter, 4Q09 accounted for 29.7% of the revenues for 2009, compared to 26.2% for Q408. Much of this increase was driven by Open Networked Storage, which posted its first year-over-year growth, of 3.6%, since the fourth quarter of 2008."

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 23.7% revenue share in the fourth quarter, followed by IBM, with 16.8% market share. HP ended in the third position with 12.1% market share. NetApp and Dell finished the quarter in a statistical tie for fourth position with 8.3% and 8.1% revenue share respectively.

The total open networked disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) grew 3.6% year over year in the fourth quarter to $4.2 billion in revenues. EMC continued to maintain its leadership in the total open networked storage market with 27.9% revenue share, followed by IBM with 16.0% revenue share.

In the Open SAN market, which grew 0.9% year over year, EMC was the leading vendor with 20.4% revenue share, followed by IBM with 19.3% share.

The NAS market grew 12.6% year over year, led by EMC with 50.5% revenue share and followed by NetApp with 20.2% share. The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 30.0% revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 31.5% revenue share, followed by EMC with 15.7%.

"Network Attached Storage (NAS) now represents 20% of external disk storage systems factory revenue as users look for storage solutions to help them deal with the continued growth IDC sees with unstructured, file-based data," said Steve Scully, research manager, Enterprise Storage. "The growing number of unified storage solutions has made it easier for customers to implement one platform for multiple file-based and block-based storage workloads."