Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue rose 8% to $5.4bn in the first quarter of 2012, compared to $5bn in the same period in 2011, reporting tenth consecutive quarterly growth, according to Gartner.
Gartner research vice president Roger Cox said revenue by host interface protocol and regional geography varied from its 4Q11 forecast update.
"Block-access host interface notably associated with SAN infrastructures came in at 4 percent year-over-year growth in vendor revenue against a forecast of 5.2 percent, while file-access beat the Gartner forecast with 22.9 percent year-over-year growth, four percentage points higher than Gartner’s forecast."
While there may have been occasions when the ECB disk storage vendors were unable to secure a specific hard-disk drive (HDD) capacity, the issues presented by the October 2011 Thailand flood are largely behind them, the research firm stated.
HDD pricing for ECB disk storage systems remains above preflood levels on a per-terabyte basis.
EMC continued to dominate the market with a 2.4% market share increase in 1Q12 and saw 21.9% of its total disk storage revenue from recent acquisitions of Data Domain, Avamar and Isilon.
Both NetApp and Dell also gained share in the first quarter of 2012 and Dell’s ECB disk storage acquisition strategy is beginning to pay off for it, with 73.5% of its revenue through its EqualLogic PS series and by the Dell Compellent Storage Center platform.
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Gartner said NetApp was one of three vendors to achieve share gains, relying on the proven value propositions of its core Data ONTAP technology.
Hitachi/HDS reported a rise in VSP platform revenue by 24.5% compared with the same period a year earlier, increasing its enterprise or monolithic frame-based market share by 6.3%.
With a 42.9% rise in revenue, Oracle’s ZFS storage appliance was one of two vendors to gain share in the network attached storage (NAS) market in the first quarter.
IBM increased its percentage of internally developed ECB disk storage platforms to 70.4% of its total first-quarter 2012 revenue, up by 9% over the first quarter of 2011.
HP’s 3PAR, which grew 137.4% year over year, was the company’s lone quarter highlight as EVA, P4000 LeftHand, and the P2000 MSA series continued to decline.
