There are signs that the enterprise storage market may be cooling off as new figures show growth in spending slowing for both external storage and all-flash external storage.
According to figures from IDC for the first quarter of 2019, total external storage revenue was up five per cent year-on-year to $6.85bn, but this is against figures of 22 per cent, 16 per cent 13 per cent, and 12.5 per cent for the previous four quarters.
Storage capacity shipped grew four per cent year-on-year for the quarter, compared with increases of 32 per cent, 18 per cent, 19 per cent, and 15.5 per cent for the previous four quarters.
Meanwhile, even all-flash external storage has seen something of a slowdown. Revenue grew 17.5 per cent year-on-year for the quarter to $2.47bn, which sounds impressive but the previous four quarters showed year-on-year increases of 57 per cent, 47 per cent, 41 per cent, and 38 per cent.
ODM-based storage, primarily driven by hyperscale cloud demand, also saw a decline of 5 per cent year-on-year to $2.9bn, compared with a decline of 1.5 per cent for the year-on-year figures for the previous quarter.
However, while revenue fell, the storage capacity shipped in ODM servers grew by 16 per cent to an estimated 68.6 exabytes (EB).
