WW Disk Systems Revenue Grew 5% Y/Y to $8.8 Billion in 3Q14 – IDC

Total worldwide disk storage systems factory revenue grew 5.1% year over year to nearly $8.8 billion during 3Q14, according to the International Data Corporation‘s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

Total disk storage systems capacity shipped was 25EB. New capacity shipments grew 42% year over year during the quarter.

“The storage market had quite a few bright spots during the third quarter,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC storage. “Server-based storage with robust amounts of capacity drove internal storage revenue up 10%, while sub-$100,000 external array revenue grew more than 6% during the quarter. But the biggest market impact came from sales of storage systems by Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) directly to hyperscale datacenters. Revenue generated by this newly tracked set of complete and partially built storage systems grew 22% during the quarter and accounted for 43% of all capacity consumed.”

3Q14 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 20.8% and 14.6% respectively. It should be noted that the addition of ODM Direct to tracker has increased the size of the total market and thus changed relative shares, though rankings were not impacted.

WW Total Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q14
(revenue in $ million)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 5, 2014)

Open Networked Disk Storage Systems Highlights
The total open networked disk storage market (NAS combined with non-mainframe SAN) was up 2.1% year over year to $5.1 billion in revenue. EMC maintained its leadership in the total open networked storage market with 34.1% revenue share. NetApp was the second largest supplier with 14.7% share.

3Q14 External Disk Storage Systems Results
EMC was the largest external storage systems supplies during the quarter with 31.4% of worldwide sales, up from 30.6% one year ago. NetApp was the number 2 vendor in the external disk storage systems market with 12.9% share in 3Q14. IBM and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie for the number 3 position with market shares of 10.2% and 9.7%, respectively. Hitachi and Dell also ended 3Q14 in a statistical tie* for the number 5 position.
* Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide disk storage systems market when there is less than one% difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors.

WW External Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q14
(revenue in $ million)
                                                                                           
(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 5, 2014)

Introduction of ODM Direct Storage Systems
The changing role of the original design manufacturer (ODM) has allowed Web services and cloud service owners of hyperscale datacenters to design, procure, and/or deploy new storage architectures, with limited or no involvement from traditional IT OEMs. The relevance and size of these environments has expanded steadily over the last five years and many of these cloud players now offer cloud computing services that compete with on-premise server deployments for workloads, including Web, mobile, big data/analytics, social collaboration, etc. This increasing market influence and the importance of maintaining a holistic view of the storage market is what ultimately lead IDC to start tracking ODM Direct systems.

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 (OEM) sales are not included in this study. In this study, HDS sales do not reflect their OEM sales to Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global disk storage market on a quarterly basis. The tracker includes quarterly shipments and revenues (both customer and factory), terabytes, $/gigabyte, gigabyte/unit, and average selling value. Each criteria can be segmented by location, installation base, OS, vendor, family, model, and region.