Despite gloomy macro conditions worldwide and geopolitical unrest in the Middle East, the worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market continued to grow at a record pace in the second quarter of 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide ECB disk storage revenue totalled $5.1 billion in the second quarter of 2011, an 11.6 percent increase from revenue of $4.6 billion in the second quarter of 2010.
In the second quarter of 2011, the Asia/Pacific and Latin America regions outpaced the overall market, growing 27.9 percent and 22.4 percent, respectively, followed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at 12.2 percent, North America at 7.5 percent and Japan at 1.8 percent. From a year-over-year perspective, the block-access market segment, which is dominated by storage area network (SAN) deployments, generally met Gartner’s forecast expectations with 7.8 percent growth, while the file-access network-attached storage (NAS) market segment came in stronger at 27 percent growth.
“These results reflect the ongoing strength of initiatives associated with product refreshments, deployments of ECB disk storage to support virtualized server and virtualized desktop infrastructures, the transitioning of backup/recovery technology from tape to disk, and the implementation of new unstructured data applications on file-access disk storage platforms,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. “Client inquiries underpin the observation that IT executives remain willing to invest in modern ECB disk storage solutions to improve operational efficiency and minimize the impact of unabated terabyte growth.”
EMC increased its worldwide ECB disk storage revenue market share to 31.5 percent in the second quarter of 2011. NetApp experienced the strongest growth among the top-tier vendors with a revenue increase of 28.9 percent year over year.