IDC says midrange arrays, server-based storage and capacity consumption by hyperscale datacentres drove third quarter storage spend says IDC. The analyst estimate total worldwide disk storage systems factory revenue grew 5.1 percent year over year to nearly US$8.8 billion during the third quarter of 2014 (3Q14). Total capacity shipped was 25 exabytes with new capacity shipments growing at 42 percent year over year over the same period.
 
According to Eric Sheppard, Research Director, Storage server-based storage drove internal storage revenue up 10 percent while sub-$100K external array revenue grew more than 6 percent during the quarter. However, he notes that the largest driver is sales of external storage systems by Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) directly to hyperscale datacentres – growing at 22 percent during the quarter and accounted for 43 percent of all capacity consumed.
 

Via: Wikibon Infographics
 
As expected EMC top the market with 20.8 percent with HP close by at 14.6 percent. NetApp is the only other pure storage vendor to be in the top five. This suggests that strong influence of server and system sales in the delivery of storage solutions.
 
Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Total Disk Storage Systems Market, Third Quarter of 2014 (Revenues are in Millions)
 
Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 5, 2014
 
External open networked storage (NAS and non-mainframe SAN) was a low 2.1 percent. EMC leads this market segment with 34.1 percent revenue share. NetApp was a distant second with 14.7 percent share.
 
EMC was the largest external storage systems supplies during the quarter with 31.4% of worldwide sales, up from 30.6% one year ago. NetApp was the number 2 vendor in the external disk storage systems market with 12.9% share in 3Q14. IBM and HP finished the quarter in a statistical tie for the number 3 position with market shares of 10.2% and 9.7%, respectively. Hitachi and Dell also ended 3Q14 in a statistical tie* for the number five position.
 
Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide External Disk Storage Systems Market, Third Quarter of 2014 (Revenues are in Millions)

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, December 5, 2014
 
ODMs are growing in popularity as web services companies and cloud service owners of hyperscale datacentres discover that they can get by with lower cost but reasonably good quality storage arrays. The relevance and size of these environments has expanded steadily over the last five years and many of these cloud players now offer cloud computing services that compete with on-premise server deployments for workloads, including Web, mobile, big data/analytics, social collaboration, etc. So no surprise that IDC has started to include this area into its quarterly tracker.