WW External Disk Market Declined 15.7% From 2Q08 to 2Q09

Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue totaled nearly $3.8 billion in the second quarter of 2009, a 15.7 percent decline from the same period in 2008, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The year-over-year double-digit decline of 15.7 percent primarily resulted from the economic downturn and longer sales cycles,” said Donna Taylor, principal research analyst for Gartner’s global Storage Quarterly Statistics program. “A bright spot in the disk array market has been in Network Attached Storage (NAS), which experienced a 3.5 percent year-over-year growth rate in the second quarter of 2009.”

EMC maintained its No.1 position with 23.7 percent revenue market share (see Table 1). IBM placed second with 15.7 percent, and Hewlett-Packard came in third with 10.3 percent of the market. Dell placed fourth with 9.2 percent, followed by Hitachi/HDS with 8.7 percent. NetApp and Sun Microsystems placed sixth and seventh, respectively, with 8.5 percent and 4.5 percent market share.

Table 1: Worldwide External Controller-Based Disk Storage Vendor Revenue Estimates for 2Q09
(Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (September 2009)

• Note 1: EMC revenue excludes OEM revenue from Dell and Fujitsu Siemens.
• Note 2: Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP and Sun Microsystems.
• Note 3: Others revenue in 2Q09 includes new vendor coverage not available in 2Q08, as well as enhanced estimates of the “white box” market.


Note also that at the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2008, Gartner added new vendor coverage in the Others category, as well as enhanced ‘white box’ estimates. Therefore, revenue estimates for the Others category will tend to distort market shares among all categories until FY09, when an apples-to-apples comparison will be possible. As a result, Gartner suggests that readers focus instead on the individual ‘named’ vendors’ year-over-year revenue % change.

Gartner ECB disk storage reports reflect hardware only revenue, as well as hardware revenue associated with financial leases and managed services. Optional storage software revenue and storage area network infrastructure components are excluded.