The market for external controller-based (ECB) disk storage in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) grew by 21.2% in 2010 to record revenue of $2.53bn, according to IT research firm Gartner.
Major markets in the APeJ region have seen a consistently strong growth in storage revenue in 2010.
New Zealand, South East Asia, Greater China and Korea all saw between 21 and 23% growth in revenue; while India saw a growth of nearly 18%.
Being the second largest market in the region, Australia achieved 19% growth after two sequential declining years, the Gartner report said.
A recent Gartner survey of 100 large enterprises in Australia found that 59% of respondents ranked data growth as their top infrastructure challenge.
Opposite to what happened in 2009 when entry-level modular storage saw the fastest growth, in 2010, monolithic and midrange modular systems grew faster than the lower-end market.
The growth could be attributed to the recovering economy, due to which organisations reactivated high-end investment because they needed the advanced features to address the growing need to consolidate and manage data, Gartner said.
Gartner principal analyst Jimmie Chang said storage infrastructure modernisation and consolidation driven by server virtualisation, disk-based data protection plus expanded disaster recovery projects, multimedia-based applications, and emerging cloud storage services are the engines that are driving the ECB disk storage vendor revenue growth in Asia Pacific.
Block-access ECB storage still dominated in the APeJ region with 86% share of the market, and growth of 20% over 2009.
Network attached storage (NAS) grew 28% indicating strong demand for file-based storage, however, it occupied only 13% of the total ECB storage market and its growth was still slower than the 36% worldwide average growth rate.
Although content-addressed storage (CAS) declined in all other regions across the world, it saw an exceptional 40% growth in APeJ, mainly in Singapore and Australia. However, it represented only 1% of the total ECB market.
Amongst the major vendors, EMC was the biggest winner in the APeJ region with 34.1% revenue growth in 2010 and 41.5% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2010, followed by IBM with revenue growth of 15.9% in 2010, but it lost 0.9% market share.
HP with a number of newly acquired product lines remained in third spot, while Hitachi Data Systems is giving tough competition to HP by performing well both in the fourth quarter and the full year 2010, especially in key markets like China.
The Gartner report said that Oracle was the biggest loser in 2010, as it lost about a half of former Sun Microsystems’ market share in 2009.
