Those of you who are encouraged by the strength of the server market will be depressed to see that the storage systems market is down again – this time by 15.2% in the quarter to $6.8b and by 11.7% in the year to the end of September to 26.5b. Things weren’t much better in the disk drive market, where revenues were down even more (-25.6%) in the quarter and year (-12.7%). You’ll want to learn more about why this important enterprise IT sector is faring so badly.
My Figure shows the quarterly development of storage system and device revenues by quarter. It illustrates that even the modern form factors (DRAM and NAND) are doing badly. this is not a factor of capacity, which continues to grow: rather it shows the result of a slackening of demand and its effect on prices.
Storage system market shares ($US million) – years to the end of September 2014 and 2015
| <Q314 | Share % | <Q315 | Share % | Growth % | |
| EMC | $7,247 | 21.7% | $7,144 | 24.2% | -1.4% |
| NetApp | $3,850 | 11.5% | $3,342 | 11.3% | -13.2% |
| HP | $3,337 | 10.0% | $3,196 | 10.8% | -4.2% |
| IBM | $2,769 | 8.3% | $2,197 | 7.4% | -20.7% |
| Hitachi | $2,358 | 7.1% | $1,720 | 5.8% | -27.1% |
| Dell | $1,599 | 4.8% | $1,541 | 5.2% | -3.7% |
| NEC | $1,516 | 4.5% | $1,227 | 4.2% | -19.1% |
| Oracle | $858 | 2.6% | $787 | 2.7% | -8.2% |
| Other | $9,897 | 29.6% | $8,370 | 28.3% | -15.4% |
| Total | $33,431 | 100.0% | $29,524 | 100.0% | -11.7% |
EMC leads the storage systems market with a 24.2% share (see Table), so once its acquisition is complete Dell will hold around 30% of the market. All the major vendors had declining revenues in the year – the worst of which was at IBM, Hitachi and NEC.
Disk drive market shares ($US million) – years to the end of September 2014 and 2015
| <Q314 | Share % | <Q315 | Share % | Growth % | |
| Western Digital | $15,269 | 27.6% | $13,959 | 28.9% | -8.6% |
| Seagate | $14,020 | 25.3% | $12,878 | 26.7% | -8.1% |
| Toshiba | $7,134 | 12.9% | $5,201 | 10.8% | -27.1% |
| Samsung | $4,888 | 8.8% | $4,330 | 9.0% | -11.4% |
| Hitachi | $1,920 | 3.5% | $1,583 | 3.3% | -17.6% |
| Fujitsu | $1,306 | 2.4% | $1,196 | 2.5% | -8.4% |
| Sony | $1,134 | 2.0% | $1,050 | 2.2% | -7.4% |
| Other | $9,693 | 17.5% | $8,110 | 16.8% | -16.3% |
| Total | $55,364 | 100.0% | $48,306 | 100.0% | -12.7% |
It wasn’t a great year for the disk drive manufacturers either. This market is headed up by Western Digital and Seagate, which held 28.9% and 26.7% shares respectively. along with Toshiba they are the only makers of spinning disk drives. The other vendors featured in the table manufacture a variety of solid state devices.
The Figure shows annual market shares for the storage systems and disk drive markets. It is interesting to see the cross over between these (previously) very distinct markets: Seagate for instance recently acquired Dot Hill. Increasingly vendor success is becoming dependent on storage software, with a number of vendors now selling it to customers without insisting on them buying hardware arrays.
To a certain extent the falling storage systems market is a confirmation of the move to ‘software defined’ enterprise IT. Some of the money which in previous years would have been spent on dedicated arrays is now being spent on servers – one reason why that market is not in decline.
As always I have more data than I show in this post: so please contact me if you need specific information for your business plns.
Whatever happened to the big data deluge ? Everyone has been predicting more and more and more data… an enormous avalanche of data… but the strorage market is down again.
Your take, Martin ?