Middle East hard hit in external disk segment

Middle East is among the most acutely affected regions globally for the external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market, which experienced a drop in revenue in 2009 in other markets, a senior official of IT research and advisory firm Gartner said.

"The large monolithic / frame-based disk array market declined 21.1 per cent, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, this segment represented less than 30 per cent of the total market," said Roger Cox, Research Vice-President at Gartner. "This result, in part, reflects the advancements that the lower-cost modular disk array systems have made in performance and capacity scalability, as well as robust data services associated with local and remote replication."

The ECB disk storage market was impacted by the global economic downturn in 2009 and experienced an 8.6 per cent year-over-year decline from $18 billion (Dh66bn) in 2008 to $16.3bn in 2009, according to Gartner. This is the first annual decline for the market since 2002. All regions experienced a drop in revenue in 2009; the most acutely affected regions were Japan, Latin America, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Reflecting the increase in unstructured data and file sharing consolidation, the network-attached storage market segment rose 1.4 per cent in 2009, while the block-access modular ECB disk storage segment dropped 2.8 per cent and the special purpose disk archiving system segment fell 31.6 per cent in revenue. Year-over-year raw terabyte shipments grew only 39.1 per cent in 2009, and the price per terabyte decreased 34.3 per cent, well within historic trends.

EMC retained the top spot in 2009, in part because of its leadership in the monolithic / frame-based, block access modular disk array and special-purpose disk archiving storage systems markets and the acquisition of data domain. Led by revenue growth in 2009 and the 4Q09 resurgence in its DS5000/3000 series, IBM grew 11.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 strengthening its hold on the number two market share position.