… And 8% for Gartner

Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue totaled $5.4 billion in the first quarter of 2012, an 8% increase from revenue of $5 billion in the first quarter of 2011, according to Gartner, Inc.‘s Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries, 1Q12 Update.

The first quarter of 2012 was the 10th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, and its results met Gartner’s expectations of an 8% year-over-year increase.

"Revenue by host interface protocol and regional geography varied from Gartner’s 4Q11 forecast update," said Roger Cox, research VP at Gartner. "Block-access host interface notably associated with SAN infrastructures came in at 4% year-over-year growth in vendor revenue against a forecast of 5.2%, while file-access beat the Gartner forecast with 22.9% year-over-year growth, four percentage points higher than Gartner’s forecast."

While there may have been occasions when the ECB disk storage vendors were unable to secure a specific HDD capacity, the issues presented by the October 2011 Thailand flood are largely behind them. HDD pricing for ECB disk storage systems remains above pre-flood levels on a per-terabyte basis.

With a 2.4% market share increase in 1Q12, EMC continued to dominate the market. Observing that 21.9% of its total ECB disk storage revenue came from recent acquisitions (Data Domain, Avamar and Isilon), EMC was No. 1 in the worldwide ECB disk storage market.

WW ECB Disk Storage Vendor Revenue Estimates for 1Q12
                                    (in $million)
   
    1: EMC revenue excludes OEM revenue from Dell and Fujitsu
    Technology Solutions.
    2: Hitachi/HDS revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP.
    3: NetApp revenue excludes ONTAP OEM revenue
    from IBM and Engenio OEM revenue.
    4: Fujitsu’s branded revenue does not include products sold
    under the EMC and NetApp brands.
    (Source: Gartner, June 2012)

Both NetApp and Dell also gained share in the first quarter of 2012.

Dell‘s ECB disk storage acquisition strategy is beginning to pay off for it, with 73.5% of its ECB disk storage revenue being produced by its EqualLogic PS series and by the Dell Compellent Storage Center platform.

Relying on the proven value propositions of its core Data ONTAP technology, NetApp was one of three vendors to achieve share gains in the first quarter of 2012.

Hitachi/HDS increased its VSP platform revenue by 24.5% in the first quarter of 2012 compared with the same period a year earlier, increasing its high-end enterprise (aka monolithic frame-based) market share by 6.3% points.

With a 42.9% year-over-year increase in revenue, Oracle‘s ZFS storage appliance was just one of two vendors to gain share in the NAS market in the first quarter.

Although it lost 0.7% points of market share, IBM increased its percentage of internally developed ECB disk storage platforms to 70.4% of its total first-quarter 2012 revenue, up 9% points over the first quarter of 2011.

HP‘s 3PAR, which grew 137.4% year over year, was HP’s lone first-quarter 2012 highlight as EVA, P4000 LeftHand, and the P2000 MSA series continued to decline.

With 17.1% and 14.1% year-over-year vendor revenue growth, the Latin America and North America regions did exceptionally well compared with Gartner forecast expectations, while the AsiaPac region, at only 4.1% year-over-year growth, and Japan, with a 12.3% decline, fell far short.

Gartner ECB disk storage reports reflect revenue from new vendor-branded hardware only, as well as hardware revenue associated with financial leases and managed services. Optional and separately priced storage software revenue and storage area network infrastructure components and used ECB disk storage systems are excluded.