External OEM storage revenue hits $6.9 billion for enterprise market
Global market revenue for enterprise external OEM storage systems grew 9.7% year over year to $6.9 billion during the second quarter of 2021 (2Q21), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker.
Total external original design manufacturer (ODM) storage capacity shipped was up 27.9% year over year to 22.1 exabytes during the quarter.
Revenue generated by the group of ODMs selling directly to hyperscale data centers declined by 7.7% year over year in 2Q21 to $6.4 billion, while capacity shipped grew 13.8% year over year to 88.7 exabytes.
Enterprise storage capacity shipments for the entire market (External OEM, ODM Direct and Server-Based Storage) increased 25.2% to 156.1 exabytes.
Dell Technologies was the largest external enterprise storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 26.8% of worldwide revenue, while HPE/H3C was the second largest supplier during the quarter with 10.9% of revenue.
NetApp and Huawei tied for third place with 9.9% and 8.9% of total revenues, respectively.
Three vendors, Hitachi, IBM, and Pure Storage, tied for fifth place in the market with shares of 4.9%, 4.7% and 4.1%, respectively.
The total All Flash Array (AFA) market surpassed $2.7 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 7.6% year over year. Meanwhile, the Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market surpassed $2.8 billion in revenue, up 13.3% from the year ago quarter.
When it comes to geographies, storage revenue in China grew 33.3% year over year. Japan declined 21.2% in 2Q21 compared to 2Q20, while Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China) was up 15.4%.
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew 3.7% on a year-over-year basis with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) showing double-digit growth of 26.0%.
The United States was up 5.9% and Canada grew 29.5%., and Latin America saw its first growth in external storage revenues this quarter since 1Q20, up 12.5%.
IDC research manager Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Zsofia Madi-Szabo says, "The external storage systems market recovery observed during first quarter of 2021 continued even stronger during the second quarter.
"The degree to which demand returned was highly influenced by the rate at which each regional economy has recovered from the difficulties associated with the global pandemic."
IDC defines an Enterprise Storage System as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and, in some instances, host bus adapters, 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 (for instance, switches) and non-bundled storage software.
