The worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market in 2009 experienced an 8.6% year-over-year drop from $18bn in the prior year to $16.3bn in 2009, according to Gartner.
All regions experienced a drop in revenue in 2009; and the most acutely affected regions were Japan, Latin America, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
EMC retained the top spot in 2009 with 25% market share, followed by IBM with 14.8%, and HP stood third with 10.4%. Hitachi, Dell and NetApp ranked fourth, fifth and sixth, respectively. Hitachi achieved a 9% market share, followed by Dell and NetApp with 8.5% and 8.3% respectively.
According to Gartner, EMC retained the top spot in part because of its leadership in the monolithic/frame-based, block access modular disk array and special-purpose disk archiving storage systems markets and the acquisition of Data Domain.
For the fourth quarter of 2009, controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue dropped 2.5% to $4.85bn, compared to $4.98bn in the same period last year.
Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner, said: “The large monolithic/frame-based disk array market declined 21.1%, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, this segment represented less than 30% of the total market.
This result, in part, reflects the advancements that the lower-cost modular disk array systems have made in performance and capacity scalability, as well as robust data services associated with local and remote replication.”
