There’s good news out there for enterprise storage growth and consumption. Gartner recently reported that during the first quarter of 2010, the worldwide external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.3 percent over the same period last year.
What drove that growth? Much of it was attributed to the need to refresh outdated storage infrastructures. When the economy began its slump, IT budgets were reduced and purchase decision were put on hold. The fact that spending has begun again is a good sign for our industry in general.
In fact, Gartner’s report indicated that every global market and region, except for Japan, showed double-digit growth when examining the data year-over-year. North America’s growth even topped the worldwide figure, at a rate of 25.5 percent.
So who were the big storage winners? EMC topped the list for highest revenue of 1.2B for 1Q10, while NetApp could be listed in the “most improved” category for year-over-year growth showing an increase of nearly 45%. IBM took the number two spot though overall for revenue, while HP and Dell weren’t too far behind, and all still held double-digit growth rates. Certainly all five of these makers can be congratulated and viewed as winners during the strong first quarter of 2010.
