External Disk Storage Market Scores Fourth Highest Revenues in Q3, IDC Finds

Since press releases regarding financial aspects of various markets are coming out one after another, IDC figured it would pull its own weight by revealing what the situation was on the external disk storage systems market.

The total factory revenues posted were a bit under $5.2 billion, a figure which corresponds to a year-over-year growth of 19.0%, during the third quarter of 2010.

These findings were made by the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems.

It was also mentioned that the total disk storage systems market grew by 18.5% over Q3, 2009, to $0.7 billion, while disk storage systems capacity grew by 65.2%, to 4,299 petabytes.

"The economic crisis of 2009 and commensurate budget reductions compelled end users invest in lower-priced storage systems that still offer enterprise-level features," said Amita Potnis, senior research analyst, Storage Systems.

"Although most IT budget restraints have been lifted, the trend toward lower-priced systems continued into 2010 as revenues for external storage systems in the lower price bands ($0-$24.99k) increased by 21.1% year over year,” she explained.

“End-users keep looking to get the most for their money, while vendors continue to invest resources to develop storage systems that meet this need,” Potnis added.

"Users are still making up for their reduced storage spending in 2009 as the third quarter recorded the fourth highest revenues in a single quarter for external disk storage systems," said Liz Conner, senior research analyst, Storage Systems.

"The increased investment by end users and vendors alike in iSCSI SAN and NAS (41.4% and 49.8% year-over-year growth respectively) has helped fuel the overall growth, while easing budget constraints sparked a pickup in FC SAN and higher end systems alike," Conner added.

The top five worldwide vendors of external disk storage data systems are EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP and Dell, in that order.