Data centre SSD sales soar at the expense of hard drives

Update 1 May 2020: Hitachi Vantara dispute Gartner numbers.

Data centre server and SSD revenues are expected to soar between 2019 and 2024. At the same time disk drive revenues will contract, Gartner’s first data centre semiconductor revenues report reveals.

Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers has distributed a summary to his subscribers. According to Gartner, semiconductor server revenues were $30.3bn in 2019 and will grow 8.1 per cent CAGR to $44.7bn in 2024.

Data centre SSD revenues will increase 24.9 per cent CAGR from $7.74bn in 2019 to $23.5bn in 2024. Hard disk drive revenues will decline at -3.8 per cent CAGR. 

Gartner forecasts DRAM revenues will increase 11.9 per cent from 2019’s $11.8bn to 2024’s $20.7bn and NAND flash memory revenues will jump 25.5 per cent from $7.4bn to $23.2bn. Emerging memory technologies such as 3D XPoint and PCM will grow from 64.9 per cent from current lowly level to about $1bn (our very rough estimate, based on the chart below).

Supplier revenue shares

Gartner details all-flash array supplier revenues in a separate report and Rakers has helpfully made a chart that uses the data.

Dell EMC is in first place, with $688m in revenues in the final 2019 quarter. NetApp is second ($501m) and IBM ($372m) and Pure ($368m) are in joint third place.

Rakers has made a supplier revenue share pie chart to aid vendor comparison:

Huawei is fifth with $321m. Then comes HPE at $213m, while Hitachi Vantara missed out on the big flash array bucks, with revenues of about $80m. This is low. A fast-growing startup such as VAST Data could soon overtake it.

Update 1 May 2020: A Hitachi Vantara spokesperson told us: “While we admire and appreciate our analyst friends, sometimes they have to make best guesses and those guesses can be wrong. The Gartner numbers cited [above are analyst estimates only and they were not corroborated by Hitachi as accurate. In fact, we can assure you these estimates are significantly under our actuals.”

We’re told Hitachi Vantara is a privately held, wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. As such, it does not publicly disclose its revenues to the industry analyst community for the purposes of market share reporting.