History (1998): 775,000 RAIDs Shipped in 1996

The increasing demand for fault tolerant disk storage for use with network file servers, mainframes and specialized computer systems continues to boost sales of disk drive arrays, popularly known as RAID subsystems.

The new Disk/Trend market study on disk drive arrays ($1,845) reports shipments of 775,000 arrays in 1996, growing to an estimated 986,000 in 1997, and projected to reach a shipment total of 1.5 million arrays in 2000.

Sales revenues for disk drive arrays are also growing, but not as fast as unit shipments. The sales total for 1996 was $ 10.8 billion, with 2000 forecasted to reach $17.2 billion.

The slower sales revenue growth is caused by declining average unit prices for disk drive arrays, made possible by the efficiencies of larger scale manufacturing and declining disk drive price-per-megabyte levels.

The shakeout of manufacturers with marginal market shares is continuing. The 1995 report listed a peak count of 179 companies offering RAIDs under their own name, but the new report indicates only 149 companies remain in the disk drive array business in 1997. IBM, EMC, Digital Equipment and Compaq Computer were the leaders in WW 1996 sales.

77.8% of the existing disk drive array producers are headquartered in USA, and produced over 92.2% of the 1996 revenue total.

The largest market for RAIDs continues to be in network server and mid-range system applications. In 1996, this product group produced 62.3% of the sales revenues and 93.5% of total unit shipments. WW sales revenues for network/mid-range system arrays are projected to climb from 1996’s $6.7 billion to $14.3 billion in 2000. While most of the disk drive arrays currently offered in the network/mid-range system market are designed for attachment to a server or processor host, a growing number of participating manufacturers are expected to add models designed for direct network attachment, making possible design simplification and lower cost.

The total amount of disk storage used with mainframe computers is expected to continue growing through 2000, but sales revenues for mainframe RAIDs started a downward path in 1996. The 1996 total was slightly under $4 billion, with a decline to $2.7 billion projected for 2000. The demand for disk storage capacity used with mainframes is increasing at a healthy rate, but the average price-per-megabyte for high-end disk drives is decreasing even faster, depressing overall sales revenues.

RAIDs sold by the originating manufacturer as complete subsystems continue to dominate array shipments and are projected to provide 60.6% of the unit shipment total in 2000.

Array controller boards, used by system manufacturers, integrators and do-it-yourselfers to assemble complete array subsystems, held 40.5% of the 1996 array total, but are destined to decline. The 2000 share for board-level array controllers is forecasted at 25.4%, as some PC network arrays start to use low cost array chip sets which can be mounted on system motherboards, eliminating the need for separate array controller boards.

Software-based array products are expected to hold 14% of the 2000 market, with usage concentrated in mirrored disk – or RAID-1 – applications.

The report contains basic product specs on 678 disk drive array models and profiles of 182 existing and former manufacturers of disk drive arrays.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 120 on January 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.