Who's #1 in disk arrays? (yawn)

Most end users don’t care much about vendors’ market shares (although they do care who’s rising or falling rapidly) but, maybe because I’m a bit of a sports fan, I like stats and standings, including those in the largest revenue segment of the storage industry – disk arrays.

Gartner Inc.’s numbers for the “external controller-based disk storage market” in the second quarter of this year (the most recent period for which they have final tallies) show that the 800-pound gorilla held on to its first place position, comfortably. On Q2 revenues of just over $1 billion, EMC garnered a 24.3% market share, followed by IBM with 14.1% ($631.7 million) and HP at 11.8% ($528.6 million).

Rounding out the top eight vendors were Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Sun and Fujitsu (including Fujitsu Siemens).

Somewhat surprisingly, Sun had the highest growth year-over-year (a 34.7% increase in revenues), attributable largely to its success with the StorageTek 2000/6000/9000 series of arrays. Also surprisingly, all but two of the top eight vendors had double-digit growth, with NetApp coming in second behind Sun with a 22.9% increase. Only HP (3.4% growth) and Fujitsu (a -2.8% decrease) did not rack up double-digit growth.

In one more surprising stat, the “other vendors” category showed strong growth in Q2, posting a 38.5% increase in revenue year-over-year while increasing market share from 13.5% in Q2 2007 to 15.8% in Q2 2008.

Prediction: NetApp will beat out Hitachi Data Systems within the next quarter or two to gain the #5 position in the disk array market (although it’s important to note that HDS’ revenues exclude OEM revenue from HP and Sun).