Data storage is a vital part of ITC market. In this post I offer my latest analysis based on the period to the end of the second quarter of 2021.
The world is turning digital – witnessed by the massive increases in all three types of raw storage devices. My Figure above shows the quarterly growth in the shipped Exabyte capacity of the three constituents – Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Not And (NAND) gate arrays and Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). In total capacity increased by 13% to 3.3 Zettabytes in the year to the end of June 2021 and by 23% to 956 Exabytes in the second quarter (see my Figure above). Despite the rapid growth of chip-based storage (NAND and DRAM) over the last few years, the vast proportion if raw storage capacity comes from HDDs – so much so that I have had to use a logarithmic scale to show the three types together. 
Suppliers of raw storage are split betweeen chip fabricators of NAND/DRAM and spinning disk manufacturers (see my Figure above for the total and sub-markets in the year to the end of the second quarter). The leadings suppliers are SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung, who between them held half of the overall market. Although Seagate was ahead of Western Digital in the HDD market, it was behind it in the whole market, where Western Digital SSD sales now account for half of its business mainly on account of its acquisition of SANDisk in 2016.
NAND now leads HDD in terms of quarterly spending, although not the extent many predicted 5 years ago (see my Figure above, which shows quarterly spending since 2003). Sales of DRAM have significantly overtaken both, mainly due to the rise of IoT devices and the embedding of processors into many – previously analog – devices, machines and vehicles.
The market for storage systems – machines used mainly in businesses alongside servers in data centers – hasn’t undergone as much change as that for the raw devices that go in them; which doesn’t mean that the suppliers haven’t invested enormously to incorporate and manage these devices (witness my regular assessments of IBM’s announcements). The storage systems hardware market was led by Dell EMC in the year to June, which held a share of 30.1%. In fact Dell EMC (and EMC before the acquisition) has been the leader every year since before 2003, when I started tracking this market. The storage systems software market was also headed by Dell EMC. The closest other leaders were NetApp, HPE and IBM in the year.
Total spending on storage system hardware on an annual basis has been between $32 and $42 billion each quarter since 2003. Its highest point was in 2012 and lowest in 2016. Many suppliers now offer security, encryption, de-duplication and compression to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their solutions. Most of the large ones are fitting their arrays to work along side other suppliers’ systems and cloud platforms.