Big storage vendors had some big gains in revenue for the third quarter of this year, according to a report released today by Gartner. The report tracked worldwide revenue among providers of external controller-based (ECB ) disk storage which totaled $3.42 for the quarter, a 6.8 percent increase over the same period last year.
Industry leader EMC had $757.5 million in revenue, a seven percent increase over last year, though it was the only top tier vendor in the report not to gain a double-digit increase in revenue year-over-year. EMC’s
23.7 percent share of market was 6.2 percent ahead of Hewlett-Packard
“While the most significant gains were made in the Clariion and Centera product lines, these were not enough to propel EMC to double-digit revenue growth like the other vendors in the storage market,” said Donna Taylor, principal analyst in the storage research group at Gartner in a statement.
Dell experienced the strongest growth rate with revenue increasing 37.8 percent to $187 million and it also overtook Network Appliance for the No. 5 position in the quarter. Hewlett-Packard,
the number two supplier by revenue and market share in the quarter, picked up a point over last year to garner about 17 percent of the market.
IBM picked up 1.6 percent market share to end the quarter at 13.6. More significantly, Big Blue had revenue growth of almost
21 percent, the second fastest among the top vendors. Gartner says the growth was primarily driven by IBM’s DS4000 product
as well as the introduction of its new N Series.
Hitachi/HDS and Sun Microsystems tied in revenue growth at 19.7 percent for the quarter; Hitachi/HDS had 10 percent of the market while Sun had 5.4 percent an increase of about half a percent over last year. Sun was helped by its recent acquisition of StorageTek.
The big storage news of the day was Seagate’s blockbuster acquisition of long-time rival hard disk drive maker Maxtor for $1.9
billion in stock.
