IDC muddies Storage Tracker waters

IDC has published a September storage tracker different from last year’s tracker, making overall enterprise storage market comparisons virtually impossible.

The tech analyst firm has put out a Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker that looks only at vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise external OEM storage systems market. Last year’s quarterly tracker report covered the total enterprise storage systems market. Now we just get a look at the external enterprise OEM storage systems market.

Also this latest quarterly tracker report’s numbers for the enterprise external OEM storage systems market are different from last year’s external enterprise storage systems market. Thank you, IDC.

This IDC enterprise external OEM storage systems market report tabulates the top five vendors’ results in the second 2019 quarter:

IDC’s headline points;

  • Vendor revenue decreased 0.8 per cent Y/Y to $6.3bn, 
  • Capacity shipments in the external storage systems market rose 5.2 per cent Y/Y to 16.3 EB,
  • Capacity shipments in the total market (including ODMs and server-based storage) declined 4.2% to 107.9 EB,
  • Original design manufacturers (ODMs) revenue from hyperscale datacenters declined 22.9 per cent Y/Y to $4.2bn.

Sebastian Lagana, IDC research manager, said: “Second quarter results trended similarly to the first quarter with ODMs continuing to decline against a difficult year-over-year comparison and internal (server-based) storage weighed down by a contraction in the server market. 

“While the external OEM segment was pressured by contraction in all-flash arrays, which has long been a growth driver for the segment, we did note end user investment in midrange SAN platforms remained strong, with nearly all OEMs generating growth in that portion of the market.”

Looking at the vendor numbers, HPE did very well, with a 13.5 per cent rise, overtaking NetApp. Leader Dell slid a little more than the market overall, still blowing everybody else away. It has more revenue in this market than HPE, NetApp and IBM combined.

IBM lost most percentage-wise, followed by NetApp. Hitachi grew nicely, gaining ground on IBM. 

Did server SANs impact external shared storage sales? Capacity-wise, apparently not. Revenue-wise, maybe a little. As noted above IDC has not released a worldwide total enterprise storage systems market report for the quarter so we are unable to assess how server-based storage is doing relative to the external storage market.