In the first quarter of calendar year 2008, Dell for the first time captured a leading 20.4 percent of the open systems (Windows/Linux) external worldwide disk array storage market with $422 million in revenue. Its closest competitor claimed 18.5 percent share and $384 million in revenue. Dell’s external controller-based storage revenue increased 21 percent year-over-year, and Dell gained share in iSCSI-based SANs to take the number one position with more than twice the revenue of the next leading vendor.(1) This growth demonstrates strong momentum in all segments of Dell’s worldwide storage business.

“We believe taking the lead in the Windows/Linux external storage market is significant. We have invested heavily in our portfolio across the board,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell Enterprise Storage. “This is the high-growth segment, and we plan to continue demonstrating leadership throughout our entire family of storage systems, including PowerVault, Dell/EMC and EqualLogic.”

Digital data is expanding at a rate faster than computer systems and those who manage them can reliably store, manage and protect it. Driven by digital content creation in all media – including audio, video and graphical – and the proliferation of email and data sharing of all kinds, the amount of data that needs to be stored by business and consumers alike is growing exponentially.(2)

This explains, in part, why Dell shipped over 116 petabytes in external disk storage for Windows/Linux servers in Q1, representing 95 percent of the total of 122 petabytes of external disk storage Dell ships each quarter.(1) “That is an astounding amount of storage capacity,” said Thomas. As a comparison, it is estimated by some that the total printed matter contained by all U.S. academic research libraries equals only two petabytes.(3) All told, Dell ships more than an estimated 288 petabytes of total disk storage each week within all of its products – including servers, desktops, laptops and enterprise storage systems – in order to accommodate the demand for storage in the digital universe.


(1) Source: Gartner, Inc. Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries by Robin Burke et al., June 6, 2008
(2) Source: IDC White Paper sponsored by EMC, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, March 2008
(3) Source: James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door