Desire to cut complexity drives storage

Total worldwide enterprise storage systems factory revenue grew 2,1% year over year to $8,8-billion during the second quarter of 2015 (2Q15), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.
Revenue growth was strongest within the group of original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data centeres. This portion of the market was up 25,8% year over year to $1-billion.
Sales of server-based storage were up 10% during the quarter and accounted for $2.1 billion in revenue. External storage systems remained the largest market segment, but the $5,7-billion in sales represented a -3,9% year-over-year decline. Total capacity shipments were up 37% year over year to 30,3 exabytes during the quarter.
“Companies are increasingly using new project initiatives and infrastructure refresh as an opportunity to deploy new storage technologies that are able to drive cost and complexity out of their existing storage resources,” says Eric Sheppard, research director at IDC Storage. “This is pushing critical investment dollars towards technologies like cloud-based storage, integrated systems, software-defined storage, and flash-optimized storage systems at the expense of traditional external arrays.”
EMC finished in the top position within the total worldwide enterprise storage systems market, accounting for 19,2% of all revenues in 2Q15. HP held the number two position with 16,2% of spending during the quarter. Dell accounted for 10,1% of global spending. As a collective group, storage systems sales by original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centre customers accounted for 11,5% of global spending during the quarter.