There’s lots of change underway in enterprise storage these days as the market continues to grow. Among the key trends are the rise of all-flash and hybrid flash storage, the ongoing impact of the cloud, the emergence of software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructures with storage built in, and the impact of data analytics on storage.
Industry research shows that the data storage market is healthy. Total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue grew 34 percent year over year during the first quarter of 2018, to $13 billion, according to a report released by International Data Corporation (IDC), in June 2018.
Total capacity shipments were up 79 percent year over year to 98.8 exabytes during the quarter, IDC said. Revenue generated by original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centers increased 80 percent year over year in the first quarter to $3.1 billion. This represented 24 percent of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter.
Sales of server-based storage increased 34 percent year over year, to $3.6 billion in revenue, representing 28 percent of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market was worth $6.3 billion during the quarter, IDC said, up 19 percent from the first quarter of 2017.
"This was a quarter of exceptional growth that can be attributed to multiple factors," said Eric Sheppard, research vice president, Server and Storage Infrastructure, at IDC. "Demand for public cloud resources and a global enterprise infrastructure refresh were two important drivers of new enterprise storage investments around the world.”
