As per IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker Q3 2020 release, Dell Technologies continued to be the market leader in the external storage systems market with a 29.0 percent market share by vendor revenue, followed by NetApp with a 14.8 percent market share in Q3 2020.
The IDC Tracker says that India’s external storage market witnessed a decline of 14.8 percent year-over-year (YoY) by vendor revenue and stood at $79.9 Million in Q3 2020 (Jul-Sep). The majority of the YoY decline in storage spending was due to decreased spending from professional services, government, and manufacturing organizations in Q3 2020.
“Emergence of new-age applications, multi-cloud, edge deployments, etc. are forcing organizations to revisit their enterprise IT architecture. To adapt to this changing IT landscape, enterprises need intelligent, hyper agile, scalable, resilient, and cloud-ready data platforms which are flexible and easy to use,” says Dileep Nadimpalli, Research Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC India.
Intrerestingly, all-flash arrays (AFA) contributed 39.2 percent to the overall external storage systems market in Q3 2020. Banking, telecommunications, and professional services verticals were the major contributors for AFA demand in Q3 2020. Organizations are very keen on adopting AFA for primary workloads, but we expect AFA adoption even in secondary storage in the near future due to the availability of QLC media which offers better performance and cost advantages as compared to Hard Disk Drives (HDD).
Entry storage systems grew by 3.4 percent YoY backed by increased spending from the insurance vertical in Q3 2020. High-end and mid-range storage segments witnessed a steep double-digit YoY decline in Q3 2020. COVID-19 has brought forth multiple challenges for enterprises by forcing them to change their business and IT priorities to align to customers’ demands.
By the way, the external storage systems market is expected to grow at a single-digit compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2019 – 2024 period. IDC forecasts that External Storage Systems spending is expected to significantly drop YoY in CY 2020 due to delayed demand across organizations attributing to COVID-19 impact but expect the market to recover in CY 2021.