Third 2025 quarter storage revenues grew – due to mid-range all-flash array sales
IDC published its external OEM Enterprise Storage Systems (ESS) world-wide market tracker market numbers for 2025’s third quarter showing fourth placed Pure Storage grew revenues faster than any other top 5 supplier.
The ESS market grew just 2.1 percent year-on-year to the third 2025 quarter, just under$ 8 billion, with the top five vendors taking 56.5 percent of it. Dell was top with a 22.7 percent share; $1.8 billion, declining 49 percent Y/Y. Huawei was number 2 with a 12 percent share, $953 million, up 9.5 percent Y/Y, outgrowing the market, and doing very well in China. NetApp grew 2.8 percent to $750.2 million and the third place in the rankings. This was attributed to its all-flash array sales.
A table lists all the publicly-revealed IDC numbers;
IDC slicing and dicing of the numbers revealed asymmetric patterns. First, looking at media types:
Overall storage market growth 3Q24 to 3Q25: 2.1 percent
- All-flash arrays: 17.6 percent
- Hybrid flash-disk arrays: -9.8 percent
- Disk drive arrays: -6.3 percent
Secondly, looking at market sectors:
- Entry (systems <$25,000 ASP): -8.0 percent
- Mid-range ($25,000 – $250,000 ASP); 8.1 percent
- High-End (>$250,000 ASP): -9.0 percent
Thirdly, looking at geographies:
- Japan: 14.4 percent
- Canada: 12.6 percent
- EMEA: 10.5 percent
- PRC: 9.5 percent
- APeJC: 8.6 percent
- LatAm: -0.9 percent
- USA: -9.9 percent
The USA drop was attributed to weak performance in the OEM market.
(APeJC is Asia-Pacific excluding Japan and China.)
IDC’s Juan Seminara, research director, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers, said: “The penetration of AI-infused applications and AI models into corporate datacenter will increase the need for more dedicated and efficient enterprise storage systems. IDC expects growing demand for flash storage to support projects related to artificial intelligence, both for training and inferencing.”
