Although PC sales fell off a cliff last year, makers of external disk storage seem to have had a rather good year. According to IDC’s latest disk storage report, revenue increased 4.7 percent in 2012, with a 2.3 percent year-on-year increase in Q4.
Worldwide sales totalled $24.7 billion last year, and total disk capacity shipped during the year surpassed 20 exabytes, up 27 per cent over 2011.
“FICON attached array sales and network attached storage (NAS) both helped drive the factory revenue increase during the quarter as companies invested in storage required to support mainframe environments and to deal with the continued growth in unstructured data,” said Eric Sheppard, IDC storage research director.
The open networked disk storage market grew 2.6 percent year-on-year in Q4 to hi $5.7 billion in revenues. EMC maintained its lead with a 30.7 percent revenue share in Q4, trailed by IBM and NetApp with 15 per cent and 11.6 percent respectively. HP and Hitachi tied in fourth position with market shares of 9.3 and 8.8 percent respectively. However, HP and Hitachi were the only players in the top five to lose share in Q4 2012.
In the total worldwide disk storage systems market EMC reigned supreme with a 24 percent share, followed by IBM and HP, in a statistical tie for second spot with 16.2 and 16 percent respectively. Dell and Netapp ranked fourth and fifth.
