Global external disk storage systems revenue has increased 3.3% to $5.9bn during the third quarter of 2012 (3Q12), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker revealed that the overall disk storage systems market rose 3.7% to $7.9bn, while about 7,104 petabytes of disk storage systems capacity has been shipped during the period, up 24.4% year over year.
IDC Storage Systems senior research analyst Liz Conner said that end users continue to invest in storage infrastructures despite persistent concerns surrounding global and regional economies.
"Helping to drive the worldwide market in the third quarter was the double-digit growth in multi-protocol storage architecture and strong demand for upper mid-range and high-end storage," Conner said.
During the quarter, EMC led the external disk storage systems market with a revenue share of about 30.0%, followed by NetApp and IBM, which had revenue share of about 11.9% and 11.7% respectively, while Hitachi and HP were had 9.7% market shares each when compared to same quarter in 2011.
IDC Storage Systems research director Eric Sheppard said that the disk storage systems market crossed an important milestone in the third quarter when the new capacity consumption surpassed seven exabytes for the first time.
"This milestone occurred at a time of unfavorable economic conditions in Europe and improved utilization rates contributable to storage optimization technologies, suggesting demand for storage capacity is outstripping market headwinds," Sheppard said.
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The open networked disk storage systems market grew 4.7% to $5.1bn in revenues and has been led by EMC with 33.5% revenue share, followed by NetApp with a 13.7% share in revenues.
The Open SAN market reported 4.4% rise and led by EMC with 29.8% share, followed by IBM with 14.0% and Hitachi as well as HP with 12.2% and 11.8% shares respectively.
During the period, the NAS market, which reported 5.7% rise, was led by EMC with 43.6% revenue share, followed by NetApp with 29.4% share, while the iSCSI SAN market posted 6.9% rise in revenue and was led by Dell with 28.3% revenue share, followed byEMC and NetApp with 19.8% and 13.3% market share respectively.
