Dell dominates enterprise storage market, HPE declines

The enterprise storage system market continues to be a goldmine for most vendors with demand relentlessly rising year-on-year.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market surged 19.4 percent year-over-year during the third quarter of 2018.

Total capacity shipments skyrocketed 57.3 year-over-year to 113.9 exabytes during the quarter.

Sales of server-based storage increased 10.1 percent year-over-year to reach US$3.8 billion in revenue, representing 27.3 percent of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market was worth roughly $6.3 billion during the quarter, rising from 12.5 percent 12 months earlier.

"The third quarter results show a continuation of growth realised through the first half of 2018, driven by an ongoing infrastructure refresh cycle, investments in resource intensive next-generation workloads, and expanded use in public cloud services," says IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies research manager Sebastian Lagana.

"Enterprises appreciate the value that data brings to their operations, client engagement, and innovation initiatives. As a result, there is ongoing investment in storage systems that support efficient data consumption and dissemination."

Hyperscale data centers are fuelling a huge growth in demand for equipment from original design manufacturers (ODMs), with revenue generated by this group selling direct to hyperscalers increasing 45.8 percent year-over-year to reach $3.9 billion, coming in at 27.7 percent of total enterprise storage investments over the quarter.

In terms of vendors, Dell was the largest supplier for the quarter with a 19.2 percent stake of the total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue market, and it's showing no signs of relinquishing that crown as it grew 21.8 percent year-over-year.

In second place was HPE/New H3C Group with a 16.4 percent piece of the pie on the back of a year-on-year decline of 3.3 percent. Somewhat further back in third place was NetApp with a 5.8 percent share of total revenue after growing 15.3 percent year-on-year.

Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, and Inspur were all statistically tied* for the number 4 position with shares of 3.0 percent, 3.0 percent, 2.9 percent, 2.6 percent, and 2.2 percent respectively.

External enterprise storage system results

Dell dominated the external enterprise storage system market during the quarter, accounting for 31.3 percent of global revenues. Way back in second place was NetApp on 12.8 percent, followed by HPE/New H3C Group on 10.4 percent, and Hitachi and IBM on a statistical tie with 6.4 percent and 6.2 percent respectively.

Flash-based storage systems results

The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated just over $2.15 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 39.3 percent year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market was worth slightly more than $2.6 billion in revenue, up 16 percent from 3Q17.

Notes:

a Dell Inc. represents the combined revenues for Dell and EMC.

b Due to the existing joint venture between HPE and the New H3C Group, IDC will be reporting market share on a global level for HPE as "HPE/New H3C Group" starting from Q2 2016 and going forward.

* IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market when there is a difference of one percent or less in the share of revenues or unit shipments among two or more vendors.