Dell domination – Global enterprise storage revenue surges 21.3%

The enterprise storage market is in good stead as rampant growth continues throughout its sectors.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), vendor revenue in the global enterprise storage systems market surged 21.3 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of this year, reaching a total of US$13.2 billion.

Total capacity shipments skyrocketed 70.7 percent year-over-year to reach approximately 111.8 exabytes during the quarter.

Hyperscalers are certainly having a significant impact on the market, as revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centers increased 31.7 percent to reach $3.3 billion – this represents 25.1 percent of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter.

Meanwhile, server-based storage increased nearly 25 percent to reach $3.8 billion in revenue, representing 28.5 percent of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market grew 14.4 percent to exceed $6.1 billion.

"Strong 2Q18 growth was driven by an ongoing infrastructure refresh cycle, investments in next-generation workloads, expanded use in public cloud services and data-driven initiatives," says IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies research manager Sebastian Lagana.

"The growing data economy is a big part of the current market growth. Companies of all sizes are investing in platforms that support their need to ingest, process, and disseminate large volumes of data cost effectively and without introducing new risks to the business."

And then in terms of the vendors, Dell's revenue grew 26.6 percent to come in as the largest supplier for the quarter with a 19.1 percent share of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue.

Next up is HPE/New H3C Group after a relatively slow year saw the supplier's revenues grow just 1.9 percent to maintain a 17.3 percent share of the total revenue.

Somewhat further back is NetApp with a 6.3 percent share, followed by IBM with 4.6 percent. Hitachi, Lenovo, and Huawei are all 'statistically tied' for fifth place with shares of 3.1 percent, 3 percent, and 2.7 percent respectively.

It's a similar story when going to a deeper level and focusing just on external enterprise storage systems. Dell again holds the crown with 29.2 percent of worldwide revenues, followed by NetApp with 13.5 percent, HPE/New H3C Group with 10.6 percent, and IBM and Hitachi with 9.4 percent and 6.6 percent respectively.

The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated just over $2 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 41.7 percent year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market was worth slightly under $2.6 billion in revenue, up 20.8 percent.