Dell dominates as enterprise storage market surges

Dell continued to dominate the enterprise storage market for the second quarter of 2018, maintaining its position as the world's largest supplier. 

According to the latest figures from IDC, Dell snatched 19.1% of the total storage system revenue and growing 26.6% compared to the same quarter of 2017. It contributed $4.25 billion to the market, shipping 574,600 units in the period, up more than 16% year-on-year.

HPE came in at second place with 17.3% of the market share, although its growth was markedly less at just 1.9% year-on-year. NetApp came in third position, while IBM was the fourth largest supplier of storage systems globally.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker report, the worldwide storage market is on the up, thanks to the explosion of hyperscale infrastructure, which original design manufacturers (ODMs) are selling directly to datacentres. This market increased 31.7% year over year in 2Q18 to $3.3 billion and represents a quarter of all shipments during the second quarter.

Server-based storage was also a popular trend, growing 24.9% year-on-year, which made up 28.5% of total enterprise storage investments, while external storage systems also increased in the quarter, up 14.4% compared to the same period last year.

"Strong 2Q18 growth was driven by an ongoing infrastructure refresh cycle, investments in next-generation workloads, expanded use in public cloud services and data-driven initiatives," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC.

"The growing data economy is a big part of the current market growth. Companies of all sizes are investing in platforms that support their need to ingest, process, and disseminate large volumes of data cost effectively and without introducing new risks to the business."