Storage systems 2021 – stable spending in a sea of change

The worldwide storage systems hardware market grew by just 2% in 2021 to reach $34.8 billion, which proved yet again that the success of these products has become increasingly unconnected with that of raw storage, which grew by 19% growth in the year. My Figure above shows total spending by year for storage systems verses three types of storage devices.

Storage systems in my research are external products or branded rackable arrays which are attached to servers. Not included are unbrandeed storage devices used by public cloud providers as part of IaaS and PaaS services and the raw storage included in part of (typically cheaper) servers.

The market leader of storage system hardware in 2021 was Dell EMC (see my Figure above), taking 29.0% of total global spending. In joint second place were NetApp and HPE with 9.3% and 9.2% each. IBM (which I cover comprehensively on this site) was in fourth position with 5.1%, followed by Pure Storage (4.1%) and Huawei (3.9%).

The long-term trend in vendor revenues is shown in my Figure above. It shows that Dell EMC’s lead has been similar for some time, with other vendors competing strongly with each other without being able to close the gap significant;y.

The stability of revenues in the storage systems market is similar when looked at on a regional basis as well (see my Figure above). Although both Asia Pacific and EMEA have declined as a proportion of the world market in favour of the Americas when measured in current $US exchange rates (those applied each quarter and year, which I gratefully take from OANDA), when recalculated at constant $US rates (using the same 2013 rates for the Euro and Japanese Yen across all years), proportionate spending by region for both regions looks more alike by year.

The stability of spending in storage systems by year hides significant changes in product direction and software development by these suppliers – a bit like a swan gliding on a pond; it looks graceful on the surface, but it’s legs are moving fast under the water! They are providing a number of different kinds of product – Direct Attached, Network Attached and Storage Area Networks accomodating block, file and object arrangements of data. They are also offering data encryption, deduplication and compression and handling the move to Solid State Flash from HDDs, which has the added benefit of cutting operation costs by reducing the number of spinning disks. As well has supporting the change in applications from physical to virtual machines and on to containers.

Looking to the future I expect the leadership of the market will move firmly to software, since that is the best way to take advantage of the stronger growth in raw storage sales and an even greater one in the capacity being shipped.