EMEA External Disk Systems Growing 14% in 2010

External controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) reached $5.8 billion in 2010 exceeding 2008 levels, according to Gartner, Inc. EMEA ECB storage revenue grew 14.2 percent from 2009 revenue of $5.1 billion.

"This double-digit growth in EMEA was largely due to the gradual stabilization of economies across Europe, and the fulfilling of pent-up demand resulting from the economic downturn in 2009," said Sid Deshpande, senior research analyst at Gartner. "Several storage vendors expanded their small and medium business (SMB) products, and go to market strategies in 2010 fueling strong demand."

In EMEA, all of the top nine ECB disk storage vendors retained their 2009 rankings in terms of revenue. EMC, NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems were the only vendors among the top nine to increase market share year-on-year.

In 2010, NetApp was the fastest growing ECB storage vendor in EMEA, with a growth rate of 36 percent. NetApp’s strong performance was driven by a 37 percent increase in revenue of its FAS series product line and an 84 percent increase in its V-series storage virtualization product.

                 EMEA External Controller-Based Disk Storage
                       Vendor Revenue Estimates for 2010
                                     (Millions of Dollars)

Note 1: EMC revenue excludes OEM revenue from Dell and Fujitsu Siemens.
Note 2: Hitachi/HDS revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP and Sun Microsystems.
Note 3: Sun revenue is now reported as part of Oracle revenue, after the 2009 acquisition.
(Source: Gartner, March 2011)

Additional information on the ECB disk storage market is available in the Gartner Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, 4Q10 Update. The report includes vendor market share by data access method, price band, sales channel and operating system segmentation.