Storage market still hibernating
Published: 09 Dec 2002 08:45 GMT
The storage market continued to limp along in the third quarter, with market researcher IDC predicting Friday that no rebound is imminent.
Total revenue for the storage industry totaled $4.7bn in the third quarter, down 2 percent from the prior quarter. Hewlett-Packard maintained its lead in total storage, with a 27 percent share of the market, followed by IBM with 20 percent. EMC maintained the No. 3 spot but saw its market share fall to 13 percent from 11 percent amid a sharp drop in revenue. Dell Computer and Hitachi finished in a virtual dead heat for fourth place with each accounting for roughly 6 percent of the market.
"The failure to gain revenue momentum in (the third quarter) is yet another indication that a rebound in the disk storage systems market is not imminent," Charlotte Rancourt, an IDC research director, said in a statement. Although the number of gigabytes per device is growing, she said, the price per gigabyte of storage is falling faster.
The networked storage market saw the steepest declines, with the network-attached storage (NAS) market declining 10 percent sequentially and the storage area network (SAN) market falling 6 percent compared with the prior quarter.
However, despite the sales drop, IDC said that businesses are still switching their storage from directly attached storage to networked storage.
"The declining revenue picture can sometimes be misleading," said John McArthur, IDC group vice president of storage research. "The trend towards networked storage continues, which means that suppliers have to look beyond revenue to see that capacity growth of networked storage exceeds the growth of direct-attached storage."
In the NAS market, Network Appliance grabbed the top spot from EMC, which has led for the past several quarters. Network Appliance accounted for 38 percent of the market, with EMC falling to 31 percent. In the SAN sector, HP edged out EMC for the No. 1 position with 30 percent market share, while EMC had 27 percent of revenue. EMC continues to lead the combined network storage market (SAN and NAS) with 28 percent market share.
Overall, the external storage market, including SAN, NAS and direct-attached storage fell 5 percent from the second quarter. HP leads the overall external market with a 22 percent share of revenue, followed by EMC with 15.8 percent and IBM with 14.6 percent.
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