According to IDC's Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Tracker, factory revenue in the external disk storage systems market grew a record 12.5 percent year over year to $3.9 billion in the third quarter of 2005, the highest growth recorded since the inception of IDC's disk storage tracker in 2001. The total worldwide disk storage systems market also grew at a record year-over-year rate of 13.3 percent to $5.7 billion in the third quarter of 2005. Total disk storage petabytes grew 58 percent year over year in the third quarter, eclipsing half an exabyte for the first time at 505 petabytes.

"This is the third consecutive quarter that disk storage systems revenue growth has outpaced that of the server market," said Brad Nisbet, program manager in IDC's Storage Systems program. "However, internal storage growth has exceeded external growth in three of the last four quarters, as organizations explore new technologies that increase the flexibility of storage configurations."

Total External Disk Storage Systems

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 20.3 percent, followed by HP and IBM with 19.1 percent and 12.9 percent revenue share, respectively. Hitachi improved its share position to end the quarter in a virtual tie with Dell for the fourth position with 8.3 percent revenue share versus 8.4 percent for Dell.

Network Disk Storage Systems

The total network storage market (NAS combined with Open and iSCSI SAN) increased 17.1 percent year over year in the third quarter to nearly $2.5 billion. EMC continues to maintain its leadership in the total network storage market with 27.2 percent revenue share, followed by HP with 21.5 percent.

The Open/iSCSI SAN market grew 19.6 percent year over year and is still above $2.0 billion in revenue. EMC and HP continue to vie for the first place position, but remain in a statistical tie. HP had 25.0 percent revenue share and EMC had 24.2 percent revenue share for the third quarter.

In the NAS market, which grew 7.5 percent year over year, EMC maintained its 40 percent revenue share, followed by Network Appliance with 35.1 percent share. The iSCSI SAN market doubled again with 105 percent revenue growth year over year. Network Appliance continues to lead the market with 35.1 percent share, followed by EMC with 24.0 percent share. HP made the strongest share gain, increasing its iSCSI SAN revenue share from nearly zero to almost 10 percent in the third quarter from a year ago.

Total Disk Storage Systems Market - Internal plus External

In the total worldwide disk storage systems market, HP maintained its lead with 23.5 percent revenue share followed by IBM with 20.7 percent share. EMC maintained the third position with 13.7 percent revenue share.

Taxonomy Notes:

IDC defines a Disk Storage System as a set of storage elements, including controllers, cables, and host bus adapters, associated with three or more disks. A system may be located outside of or within a server cabinet and the average cost of the disk storage systems does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and non-bundled storage software.

The information in this quantitative study is based on a branded view of the disk storage systems sale. Revenue associated with the products to the end user is attributed to the seller (brand) of the product, not the manufacturer. Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sales are not included in this study. In this study, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) sales do not reflect their OEM sales to Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.