IDC: Data drives growth of enterprise storage systems market

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market increased 7.4% year over year to US$14.5 billion during the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18).

Total capacity shipments were up 1.7% year over year to 92.5 exabytes during the quarter.

Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters declined 1.5% year over year in 4Q18 to $2.7 billion.

This represents 18.8% of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter. Sales of server-based storage increased 4.7% year over year to just under $4.1 billion in revenue. This represents 28.1% of total enterprise storage investments.

The external storage systems market was worth roughly $7.7 billion during the quarter, up 12.5% from 4Q17.

"The fourth quarter results represent a slight shift from trends realized during the first three quarters of 2018, most notably the revenue decline for the ODM group of vendors as cloud providers slow their investment due to significant existing capacity," says IDC Infrastructure platforms and technologies research manager Sebastian Lagana.

"That considered, OEM vendors selling dedicated storage arrays are addressing demand from businesses investing in both on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. Ensuring storage systems support both a hybrid cloud model as well as increasingly data thirsty on-premises compute platforms is a high priority for enterprise customers."

Dell Inc was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 20.6% of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue and growing 14.8% year over year.

HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier with an 18.0% share of revenue on year-to-year growth of 0.6%.

 NetApp generated a 5.8% share of total revenue, statistically tying for the number three spot during the quarter with IBM, which captured 4.8% market share.

Huawei, Lenovo and Hitachi all statistically tied* for the number 5 position with shares of 4.0%, 3.5%, and 3.3% respectively.

As a single group, storage systems sales by ODMs directly to hyperscale data center customers accounted for 18.8% of global spending during the quarter, down 1.5% against 4Q17.