The worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market continued to grow at a record pace in the second quarter of 2011, according to IT market research firm Gartner.
In the second quarter of 2011, global ECB disk storage revenue totaled $5.1bn, an 11.6% increase from revenue of $4.6bn in the second quarter of 2010.
The strong figures for 2Q 2011 rode on the performance of the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions, which outpaced the overall market, growing 27.9% and 22.4%, respectively.
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at 12.2%, North America at 7.5% and Japan at 1.8% were other regions that showed growth in the quarter.
From a year-over-year perspective, the block-access market segment, which is dominated by storage area network (SAN) deployments, registered 7.8% growth, while the file-access network-attached storage (NAS) market segment came in stronger at 27% growth, said Gartner.
EMC increased its worldwide ECB disk storage revenue market share to 31.5% in 2Q 2011.
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NetApp experienced the strongest growth among the top-tier vendors with a revenue increase of 28.9% year over year, said Gartner.
The company added that four vendors achieved double-digit year-over-year growth in the quarter: EMC, NetApp, HP and Dell.
Gartner said EMC led the market for the first half of 2011, with 30% of the market. Its closest competitors were IBM and NetApp with 13.4% and 12.7% market share, respectively.
Gartner research vice-president Roger Cox said the results reflect the ongoing strength of initiatives associated with product refreshments, deployments of ECB disk storage to support virtualised server and virtualised desktop infrastructures, the transitioning of backup/recovery technology from tape to disk, and the implementation of new unstructured data applications on file-access disk storage platforms.
Cox added, "Client inquiries underpin the observation that IT executives remain willing to invest in modern ECB disk storage solutions to improve operational efficiency and minimize the impact of unabated terabyte growth."
