Asia/Pacific External Disk Storage Systems Market Deliver Double Digit Annual Growth as Sales

IDC: Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, a strong finish to the year saw customer revenue for the calendar year 2005 increase by 22.4% over the previous year, from US$1,573 million to US$1,926 million. Q4 2005 recorded the fastest quarterly growth rate in external disk systems, based on end-user revenue, increasing by 25.4% over the same period in 2004.

The demand for new external storage capacity increased dramatically in 2005, growing by 93.8% over the previous year. IDC noted total shipments of new external storage capacity in the APEJ region for 2005 was 147,955 TBs, up from 76,351 TBs in 2004. In addition to new applications and storage-intensive data types, the availability and greater acceptance of larger capacity ATA disk drives, as well as a steady fall in the dollar price per GB ($/GB) for fibre channel (FC) disks have contributed to the spurt in demand.

IDC expects to see continuing strong demand for additional capacity in 2006, with growth in most countries across the region, especially in the mid-range market. There is a growing trend for organizations to look into network storage solutions to expand capacity and add flexibility to existing storage installations, in order to increase asset utilization.

IDC findings indicate strong ongoing demand for storage capacity in all countries throughout the APEJ region. Organizations are continually working towards setting up disk storage systems to cope with the ever-increasing amounts of business and reference data. Demand is also driven by the availability of affordable systems to support multiple tiers of storage that address data protection and business continuity requirements, as well as end-user demand for longer-term online active archives.

A key 2005 trend for the storage market that is expected to continue in 2006 is the growing deployment of mid-range modular disk storage systems coupled with the increased adoption of entry and mid-range networked storage systems. Users reported improved flexibility and cost effectiveness through the deployment of these systems, particularly in mid-sized and smaller organizations, and in many departments within larger organizations.

Networked storage continues to form the foundation for today’s business operations as it provides a scalable and flexible IT infrastructure. IDC’s latest findings show that external disk storage systems connected to servers via a Storage Area Network accounted for 71.7% of disk storage systems revenue in 2005. In contrast, Network Attached Storage (NAS) accounted for 9.6% of the total market and storage directly attached to a server accounted for 18.7% of customer revenue in 2005.

China dominates the Asia/Pacific (ex Japan) region in terms of storage demand. External disk storage revenue in the PRC was US$551.8 million in 2005, accounting for 23.3% of the total APEJ market. Australia (14.7%) and Korea (13.5%) remained in the top 3 countries in the region.

The high growth rates for external disk storage systems in 2005 over 2004 came from the relatively small markets, including Indonesia (51.9%), New Zealand (48.1%), and Thailand (41.1%).

Top Vendors Retain Share

HP continued to dominate the Storage market, while both EMC and IBM enjoyed strong growth rates in 2005. Second placed EMC achieved growth in revenue of 29.0% to record a market share in 2005 of 22.5%. IBM’s share also increased, from 16.2% in 2004 to 19.0% in 2005 as a result of a 43.4% increase in customer revenue. The timing of new product introductions by these major vendors had an impact on year-on-year growth rates and annual market share. Each of the major vendors gained strong sales from recently introduced products, indicating high user acceptance of the new models.

Top 3 Vendors, APEJ End-User Revenue, 2005 External Storage Systems (USD million) IDC Asia/Pacific Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q4 2005

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