We blogged about Q2 2010’s data growth last September, and it’s hard to believe it’s been another year already! And maybe more surprising to some is that there’s not been any “doom and gloom” in our industry this year – even with a challenging economy – as IDC has reported another year of explosive storage growth.
Let’s look at the numbers.
During Q2 of 2011, disk storage systems grew roughly 10 percent, to $7.5 billion, compared to revenues of $6.8 billion for Q2 of 2010. That’s a nice trend indeed for the industry.
But what those numbers don’t reveal are the differences in capacity growth, as systems sold a year ago will obviously have less storage. So from the perspective of capacity, sales were up 47 percent compared with the previous year. That’s 5,353 petabytes sold for the quarter versus 3,645 petabytes for Q2 2010. This squares with the trend certainly that storage needs are exploding with no end in sight– a common theme that we write about here.
When looking at the top vendors selling storage, the battle for the top position had historically been between HP and EMC, and HP took top honors last year. This year, however, EMC gets the number one spot. While some of EMC’s victory can be attributed to acquisitions, EMC is no slouch when it comes to storage. In fact, HP just edged out EMC with the top spot last year by only .3 percent. This year, EMC’s lead is a commanding one at 21.6 percent versus HP’s at 19.2 percent.
With another year of strong storage growth overall, do these figures mesh well with what you see in the storage market for your business? We’re very interested in knowing your thoughts.
