Storage is a vital part of the ITC industry providing a resource for databases, analytics and record keeping. In the current world crisis it helps supports virtual contact where physical interaction between people is temporally impossible. In this post I look at what happened in 2019 with details about raw storage (disk and NAND drives, DRAM memory) and the storage systems which are used with servers and enterprise networks.
In my Figure above I show the annual spending on each type. Be warned I’m not comparing ‘apples with apples’ in this picture because storage systems contain some proportion of the raw elements and are sold to users rather than (typically) other vendors. We can see that from a spending point of view the storage market was not great in 2019; storage system spending declined by 4% to $33.4b, disk drives by 16% to $63.4b, NAND by 23% to $63.9b and DRAM by 22% to $34.5b.
Nevertheless the capacity of raw storage shipped grew 3% in total to 1.8 Zetabytes, with disk drives the most impressive at 12%. NAND capacity shipped was 14% less at 399 Exabytes, while DRAM capacity was down 8% at 126 Exabytes. In part this was because it was naturally impossible to replicate the massive 46% capacity growth in 2018. I show the annual growth in capacity in the Figure above.
In terms of the regional development of the storage systems market (see my Figure above) the relative differences -with the Americas on top, Asia Pacific in the middle and EMEA on the bottom – have grown over the years I show.
Market shares for storage systems, NAND and DRAM and disk drives are shown in my Figure above. The former is dominated by Dell EMC with a 30.3% share, followed by HPE and NetApp with 10.8% and 9.8% each. Huawei and IBM were smaller with 6.9% and 5.7% respectively. Although IBM’s total storage business is much larger if we were able to include its Spectrum software saless.
NAND and DRAM business is more evenly spread between a number of major chip manufacturers – so of whom don’t necessarily own all the patents on the products they sell. Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba are strong shippers of disk drives used mainly in desktop PCs these days, although I’ve included Samsung as market leader, as it makes both hard disk drives an optical drives.
I show the annual revenue development of the main storage systems suppliers in the Figure above. Dell EMC before and after the two companies came together has been the strongest vendor, while older suppliers such as Hitachi and Oracle are being slowly overtaken by newcomers such as Huawei and Pure Storage.
I believe storage will continue to be important throughout the difficult months we have ahead of us – not least in cloud services and social media, enhancing the remote connections between people at a time of isolation whether while working from home or sharing information with friends and family.