Global
external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue hit $4.6 billion in the
third quarter this year, up 16 percent over the third quarter of 2009,
according to research firm Gartner.
Despite
a market-wide decline in 2009, the 2010 numbers represent an increase over 2008
revenue. Worldwide ECB disk storage revenue in 2010 was up 8.4 percent over
2008 revenue of $4.3 billion, Gartner said.
EMC,
Fujitsu and NetApp were the only top-tier vendors whose revenue growth outpaced
the ECB market year-over-year, Gartner said.
"In
spite of an erratic global economy, and even though IT budgets remain tight, IT
executives continue to invest in ECB disk storage to support projects that
yield economic efficiencies," Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner,
said in a statement.
"Significant
investment examples include shared ECB disk storage support for virtualized
server and desktop deployments, disk-based backup and recovery modernization
initiatives, as well as new disk-based active archiving projects.
General-purpose ECB disk storage infrastructures are also being refreshed to
take advantage of new technologies that simplify storage management, reduce
operational costs, improve utilization and satisfy expanding service-level
agreements [SLAs]."
With
the exception of the EMEA region, revenue grew by double digits year-over-year
for most sectors. Latin America’s market grew 43.4
percent. Revenue in the Asia Pacific region grew by 22.2 percent, and Japan
was up 18 percent. The North American market grew 17.2 percent.
Terabytes
shipped in the quarter were up 60.4 percent over last year as
price-per-terabyte dropped 28 percent.
Network-attached
storage, meanwhile, grew 42.7 percent year over year in the third quarter,
Gartner said, as “users continue to show a growing preference for modular ECB
disk storage systems rather than the more-costly monolithic frame-based disk
storage systems.”
