IBM, HP and EMC dominate battered storage market

IBM, HP and EMC continue to dominate the Australian storage market as first quarter terabyte shipments declined by 6.1 per cent and revenue slumped by 28.8 per cent year-on-year.

IDC Asia-Pacific datacentre and enterprise servers research manager, Matt Oostveen, said while the figures were bad, it was a better result than the server market which experienced significant drops.

“The demand for storage in Australia remains strong and although there was some tempering of sales due to the cool economic conditions in Q109, the outlook remains positive,” he said.

However, Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN), shipments declined 38 per cent year on year, which is in-line with the drops seen in the server market over the same period. The iSCSI format faired much better than FC SAN recording a 15.8 per cent revenue decline.

“As FC SAN is typically deployed in enterprise environments it did not fair as well as other formats that were able to weather the market conditions more resiliently,” Oostveen said.

The analyst firm’s recent worldwide storage figures showed holes in organisations’ storage architectures were being filled with systems designed for small and medium-sized businesses, pushing enterprise disk storage revenue down by 18.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. Demand for storage capacity grew just 14.8 percent in the quarter, the slowest rate since late 2002.

“While there is a general correlation between the storage and server markets in Australia, according to IDC research, the storage market is less impacted by economic conditions as the need for storage remains strong,” Oostveen said. “It should be noted that in Australia the storage market is roughly half the size of the server market in revenue terms.”

Vendor rankings for total storage in the first quarter of the calendar year in Australia are: IBM with 30.5 per cent market share; HP with 19.4 per cent; and EMC with 16.5 per cent.

For external storage only the rankings are: EMC with 26 per cent; IBM with 22.7 per cent; and HP with 13 per cent.

*To contact the journalist on this story please email Trevor Clarke.