Market Research

Total Disk Storage Systems Turn a Corner, Posting First Year-Over-Year Gain in More Than Four Quarters

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.

"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 2009 (4Q09), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. 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. "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."