Worldwide end-user spending on enterprise storage systems grew by 18% year-over-year and reached $30.8bn in 2010, which is the highest growth since IDC started tracking the market in 1993.
Research firm IDC said that the worldwide enterprise storage systems market showed its strength and resilience by realising 18% growth in customer revenue between 2009 and 2010, after the global economic recession.
Storage Systems research director Natalya Yezhkova said after a tumultuous 2009, one of the major forces driving enterprise storage market growth was recovery in end-user spending in overall IT infrastructure.
The research firm said that the enterprise storage systems growth rates will be less volatile in the coming years as the market will grow at a comfortable 3.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2010 and 2015, and revenues will reach $37.3bn in 2015.
However, IDC added that growth in new terabyte shipments will slow down in comparison to historical rates, hampered by the adoption of various storage efficiency technologies, large installed base of TBs, and growing use of cloud-based storage.
IDC said that iSCSI SAN and network attached storage (NAS), the two fastest growing material installation segments of enterprise storage systems market will continue to experience strong growth through the forecast period. It will be driven by a major shift of storage deployments toward IP-connected systems.
The research highlighted that rich digital content, digitisation of industry specific content, and disk-based data protection and archives will create an additional boost for the NAS segment.
Further, there will be a noticeable shift in end-user spending to the entry level and midrange price bands driven by increasing adoption of modular system architectures.
IDC said that emerging market segments and technologies will have a profound impact on the storage systems market landscape in the next five years.
