WW External Disk Market Declined 8.6% in 2009

The external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market was profoundly impacted by the global economic downturn in 2009 and experienced an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline from $18 billion in 2008 to $16.3 billion in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc.‘s report, Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries, 4Q09 Update. This is the first annual decline for the market since 2002. All regions experienced a drop in revenue in 2009; the most acutely affected regions were Japan, Latin America, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“The large monolithic/frame-based disk array market declined 21.1 percent, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, this segment represented less than 30 percent of the total market,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. “This result, in part, reflects the advancements that the lower-cost modular disk array systems have made in performance and capacity scalability, as well as robust data services associated with local and remote replication.”

Reflecting the increase in unstructured data and file sharing consolidation, the network-attached storage (NAS) market segment increased 1.4 percent in 2009, while the block-access modular ECB disk storage segment declined 2.8 percent and the special purpose disk archiving system segment fell 31.6 percent in revenue. Year-over-year raw terabyte shipments grew only 39.1 percent in 2009, and the price per terabyte decreased 34.3 percent, well within historic trends.

EMC retained the top spot in 2009, in part because of its leadership in the monolithic/frame-based, block access modular disk array and special-purpose disk archiving storage systems markets and the acquisition of Data Domain.

             Worldwide External Controller-Based Disk Storage
                          
Vendor Revenue Estimates for 2009
                                   
(Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Note 1: EMC revenue excludes OEM revenue from Dell and Fujitsu Technology Solutions.
Note 2: Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP and Sun Microsystems.
Note 3: Revenue associated with the Data Domain acquisition was reported under EMC for 3Q09 and 4Q09.
Source: Gartner (March 2010)

The worldwide external controller-based storage market declined by 3% year over year in 4Q09. Block external controller-based storage revenue fell by 1%, and network-attached storage revenue dropped by 7%. EMC retained its lead, with a 26% market share.

Led by XIV revenue growth in 2009 and the 4Q09 resurgence in its DS5000/3000 series, IBM grew 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 strengthening its hold on the No.2 market share position (see Table 2). Reflecting the benefits of its unified storage architecture and the tight integration of SnapManager with leading independent software vendor (ISV) software, NetApp grew 14.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and took over the fifth spot from Dell.

             Worldwide External Controller-Based Disk Storage
                            Vendor Revenue Estimates for 4Q09
                                      (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Note 1: EMC revenue excludes OEM revenue from Dell and Fujitsu Technology Solutions.
Note 2: Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP and Sun Microsystems.
Note 3: Revenue associated with the Data Domain acquisition was reported under EMC for 3Q09 and 4Q09.
Source: Gartner (March 2010)

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.