World ECB Disk Storage Market Declined 8.6 Percent In 2009: Gartner

The external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market was profoundly impacted by the global economic downturn in 2009 and experienced an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline from $18 billion in 2008 to $16.3 billion in 2009, according to Gartner. This is the first annual decline for the market since 2002. All regions experienced a drop in revenue in 2009; the most acutely affected regions were Japan, Latin America, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The external controller-based storage market in India experienced a significant year-over-year decline of 18.6 percent from $229.7 million in 2008 to $187.1 million in 2009 in revenue. The economic downturn impacted India during 4Q08 and lasted till 3Q09.

“The severity of the impact was different for different verticals. For example, investments within the telecom segment continued unabated. The ITeS segment, the second largest vertical for storage, made very few investments. Storage efficiency and better utilisation of existing infrastructure were critical priority areas for a number of CIOs during the downturn,” says Aman Munglani, Principal Analyst at Gartner.

“The large monolithic/ frame-based disk array market declined 21.1 percent, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, this segment represented less than 30 percent of the total market,” said Roger Cox, Research Vice President at Gartner. “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.”

Reflecting the increase in unstructured data and file sharing consolidation, the network-attached storage (NAS) market segment increased 1.4 percent in 2009, while the block-access modular ECB disk storage segment declined 2.8 percent and the special purpose disk archiving system segment fell 31.6 percent in revenue. Year-over-year raw terabyte shipments grew only 39.1 percent in 2009, and the price per terabyte decreased 34.3 percent, well within historic trends.

EMC retained the top spot in 2009, 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.

Led by XIV revenue growth in 2009 and the 4Q09 resurgence in its DS5000/ 3000 series, IBM grew 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 strengthening its hold on the No 2 market share position. Reflecting the benefits of its unified storage architecture and the tight integration of SnapManager with independent software vendor (ISV) software, NetApp grew 14.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and took over the fifth spot from Dell.

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