WW Enterprise Storage Systems Revenue Grew 3% Y/Y to $9 billion in 3Q15 -IDC

Total worldwide enterprise storage systems factory revenue grew 2.8% year over year to $9.1 billion during the third quarter of 3Q15, according to the International Data Corporation‘s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

Total capacity shipments were up 31.5% year over year to 33.1EB during the quarter.

Revenue growth was strongest within the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) that sell directly to hyperscale datacenters. This portion of the market was up 23.4% year over year to $1.3 billion.

Sales of server-based storage were up 9.9% during the quarter and accounted for $2.1 billion in revenue. External storage systems remained the largest market segment, but the $5.8 billion in sales represented a decline of -3.1% year over year.

“The enterprise storage market continued to follow a consistent trend in 3Q15,” said Liz Conner, research manager, storage. “Spending on traditional external arrays declined during the quarter as infrastructure refresh, coupled with the demand for software-defined storage and cloud-based storage, drove investments more heavily in server-based storage and hyperscale infrastructure.”

3Q15 Total Disk Storage Systems Market Results
EMC finished in the top position within the total worldwide enterprise storage systems market, capturing 18.4% of all revenue. HP was the number 2 vendor with 16.3% share of revenue during the quarter while Dell finished 3Q15 in the number 3 position with a worldwide share of 9.9%. As a group, storage systems sales by ODMs selling directly to hyperscale datacenter customers accounted for 13.7% of global spending during the quarter.

Top 5 Vendors, WW Total Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q15/3Q14
(revenue in $ million)

Top 5 Vendors, WW Total Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q15/3Q14
(shares based on revenue)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 4, 2015)

3Q15 External Disk Storage Systems Results
EMC was the largest external storage systems supplier during the quarter. The company accounted for 29.1% of worldwide revenues. NetApp and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie* for the number 2 position with 11.3% and 10.4% share of worldwide revenues, respectively. IBM held a 9.3% share while Hitachi rounded out the top 5 with a 7.8% share of worldwide external storage revenue during the quarter.

Top 5 Vendors, WW External Disk Storage Systems Market, 3Q15/3Q14
(revenue in $ million)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 4, 2015)

Notes:

* IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide disk storage systems market when there is less than one percent difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors.
† IBM’s 3Q15 revenue excludes x86 servers due to the sale of that business to Lenovo.

Flash-Based Storage Systems Highlights
The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated $626.2 million in revenue during the quarter, up 60.8% year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) segment of the market continues to be a significant part of the overall market with $2.4 billion in revenue and 26.5% market share.

Taxonomy Notes

IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and (in some instances) HBAs, associated with three or more disks. A system may be located outside of or within a server cabinet and the average cost of the disk storage systems does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and non-bundled storage software.
The information in this quantitative study is based on a branded view of the disk storage systems sale. Revenue associated with the products to the end user is attributed to the seller (brand) of the product, not the manufacturer. OEM sales are not included in this study. In this study, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) sales do not reflect their OEM sales to Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.