APEJ Storage Market Achieves 21.2% Record Revenue Growth

The market for external controller-based (ECB) disk storage in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) hit record revenue of US$2.53 billion in 2010, a 21.2 percent increase from 2009, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner research vice president Phil Sargeant said that storage remained a big part of most organisations’ IT budgets, but there were many opportunities to control the cost. “By taking advantage of capabilities in the storage technologies you already have, for example compression, you can reduce the amount of storage you need to buy,” said Sargeant. “We can also reduce data volumes by moving away from a ‘keep everything’ approach to storing information. While government regulations dictate how long certain information must be kept, there is no need to store all of it on the best, most expensive storage you can buy.”

Storage revenue growth was consistently strong in the major markets in the APeJ region in 2010. Australia and New Zealand, South East Asia, Greater China and Korea all saw between 21 and 23 percent growth in revenue; India also grew nearly 18 percent. Australia, the second largest market in the region, achieved 19 percent growth after two sequential declining years.

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“Organisations are accelerating storage investment to catch up with the fast growing capacity and performance requirements, and using advanced technologies to improve storage efficiency and address the complexity issues,” said Jimmie Chang, Principal Analyst, Gartner. “Economic recovery drove storage market growth in the region. Storage infrastructure modernisation and consolidation driven by server virtualisation, disk-based data protection plus expanded disaster recovery projects, multimedia-based applications, and emerging cloud storage services are the engines that are driving the ECB disk storage vendor revenue growth in Asia Pacific.”

In 2010, monolithic and midrange modular systems grew faster than the lower-end market. This is opposite to what happened in 2009, when entry-level modular storage saw the fastest growth. As the economy was recovering, organisations reactivated high-end investment because they needed the advanced features to address the growing need to consolidate and manage data.

Block-access ECB storage still dominated in the APeJ region with 86 percent share of the market, and growth of 20 percent over 2009. Network attached storage (NAS) grew 28 percent indicating strong demand for file-based storage, however it occupied only 13 percent of the total ECB storage market and its growth was still slower than the 36 percent worldwide average growth rate. According to Gartner analysts, this means the value of NAS has not yet been fully recognised, especially in large markets such as China. Although content-addressed storage (CAS) declined in all other regions across the world, it saw an exceptional 40 percent growth in APeJ, mainly in Singapore and Australia. However, it represented only 1 percent of the total ECB market.

Amongst the major vendors, EMC was the biggest winner in the APeJ region. With 34.1 percent revenue growth in 2010 and 41.5 percent year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2010, the company easily retained the top position and left its challengers behind (see Tables 1 and 2). IBM’s storage revenue grew 15.9 percent in 2010, but it still lost 0.9 percent market share. Thanks to a number of newly acquired product lines, HP remained in third spot, however its traditional revenue generators, EVA-series and MSA-series, were weaker against the competition. Hitachi Data Systems performed well both in the fourth quarter and the full year 2010, especially in key markets like China, and has moved into the range to threaten HP’s third position. Oracle was the biggest loser in 2010, in that it lost about a half of former Sun Microsystems’ market share in 2009.

Gartner ECB disk storage reports reflect hardware only revenue, as well as hardware revenue associated with financial leases and managed services. Optional and separately priced storage software revenue and storage area network infrastructure components are excluded.