Global external disk storage systems revenue increased 2.3% year-over-year to $6.7bn in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2012, according to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC).
Total disk storage revenue including external and internal storage has increased by 0.7% to $8.6bn in the quarter compared to the same period of the previous year, with shipments increasing 25.3% year over year to eight exabytes.
During the year, the external disk storage systems market rose 4.7% to $24.7bn compared to 2011 which includes 20 exabytes of shipments, a 27% rise over previous year.
IDC Storage research director, Eric Sheppard said that although the rate of growth decelerated during the quarter, the external disk storage system market finished the year with solid fourth quarter results and even posted a record-breaking $24.7bn in full year factory revenue.
"FICON attached array sales and network attached storage (NAS) both helped drive the factory revenue increase during the quarter as companies invested in storage required to support mainframe environments and to deal with the continued growth in unstructured data," Sheppard said.
The external disk storage systems market was led by EMC with a 30.7% revenue share, followed by IBM and NetApp with a 15% and 11.6% market share, respectively.HP and Hitachi had market shares of 9.3% and 8.8%, respectively.
The Open SAN market grew by 0.3% year over year, where EMC remained in the top position with 28.7% of revenue share, IBM stood second with 18% of the market share, while HP and Hitachi with 11.9% and 11.4% shares respectively, competed for the third position.
In NAS market, EMC had a revenue share of 48.2% followed by NetApp with 28.3% share while the market increased 8.8% in the quarter.
