Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Market Revenue Grew 7.4 Percent in 4Q18, IDC Says

Vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market increased 7.4 percent year-over-year to $14.5 billion during the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18), according to new research from International Data Corp. (IDC). Total capacity shipments were up 1.7 percent year over year to 92.5 exabytes during the quarter.

Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters declined 1.5 percent year over year in 4Q18 to $2.7 billion. This represents 18.8 percent of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter.

Sales of server-based storage increased 4.7 percent year-over-year to just under $4.1 billion in revenue. This represents 28.1 percent of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market was worth roughly $7.7 billion during the quarter, up 12.5 percent from 4Q17.

"The fourth quarter results represent a slight shift from trends realized during the first three quarters of 2018, most notably the revenue decline for the ODM group of vendors as cloud providers slow their investment due to significant existing capacity," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies. "That considered, OEM vendors selling dedicated storage arrays are addressing demand from businesses investing in both on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. Ensuring storage systems support both a hybrid cloud model as well as increasingly data thirsty on-premises compute platforms is a high priority for enterprise customers."

Dell Inc. was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 20.6 percent of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue and growing 14.8 percent year-over- year. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier with an 18 percent share of revenue on year-to-year growth of 0.6 percent.

NetApp generated a 5.8 percent share of total revenue, statistically tying for the number three spot during the quarter with IBM, which captured 4.8 percent market share. Huawei, Lenovo and Hitachi all statistically tied for the number 5 position with shares of 4 percent, 3.5 percent, and 3.3 percent respectively. As a single group, storage systems sales by ODMs directly to hyperscale datacenter customers accounted for 18.8 percent of global spending during the quarter, down 1.5 percent compared to 4Q17.

(For more information visit https://www.idc.com).