WW External Disk Systems Revenue Down for Third Consecutive Quarter – IDC

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a year-over-year decline of -3.5%, totaling $5.7 billion during 3Q13, according to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

For the quarter, the total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.4 billion in revenue, representing a -5.6% decline from the prior year’s third quarter and a seasonal sequential decline of -4.1% compared to 2Q13. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached nearly 8.4 EBs, growing just 16.1% year over year.

“Despite the revenue contraction in the third quarter, we see strong demand for offerings targeted at heavily virtualized environments, such as integrated infrastructure,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC storage. “However, this demand has been offset by several factors: reduced spending from the U.S. government, increased use of storage efficiency technologies, increased investment in public cloud capacity, and general price pressures associated with increased competitive environments.”

3Q13 External Disk Storage Systems Results
EMC and NetApp experienced the greatest year-over-year share gains during the quarter. EMC improved its share in the external disk storage systems market from 30.0% (3Q12) to 30.7% of total 3Q13 revenue. NetApp was the second largest supplier in the market and increased its share from 11.9% to 13.0% during the same period. IBM accounted for 11.4% of external revenue followed by HP which accounted for 9.5%. Hitachi rounded out the top 5 vendors with an 8.3% share of revenue during the quarter.

Open Networked Disk Storage Systems Highlights
The total open networked disk storage market (NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN) declined by -3.4% year over year during the quarter to slightly less than $5 billion in revenue. EMC maintained its leadership in the total open networked storage market with 33.7% revenue share, followed by NetApp’s 15.0% revenue share.

The open SAN market declined by -6.1% year over year during the quarter. EMC lost share but was the leading vendor with 29.0% revenue share, followed by IBM in second with 14.4% market share. HP, Hitachi, and NetApp accounted for 12.5%, 10.0%, and 9.0% of sales, respectively. The NAS market increased 3.9% year over year, led by EMC with 45.3% revenue share and followed by NetApp with a 30.0% share.

WW External Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q13
(Revenues in millions)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 6, 2013)

3Q13 Total Disk Storage Systems Market Results
In the total worldwide disk storage systems market, EMC finished in the top position followed by HP with market shares of 23.7% and 17.0% respectively.

WW Total Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q13
(Revenues in millions)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 6, 2013)

WW Total Disk Storage Systems Market 3Q13Q13
(shares based on revenue)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 6, 2013)

Taxonomy Notes:
IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and (in some instances) HBAs, associated with three or more disks. A system may be located outside of or within a server cabinet and the average cost of the disk storage systems does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and non-bundled storage software.

The information in this quantitative study is based on a branded view of the disk storage systems sale. Revenue associated with the products to the end user is attributed to the seller (brand) of the product, not the manufacturer. OEM sales are not included in this study. In this study, HDS sales do not reflect their OEM sales to Sun Microsystems and HP.