A 6.7 percent year-over-year decrease is expected in 2009, but 2010 looks promising.
By Chris Talbot
The poor economy is causing the external disk storage systems market to drop, with IDC expecting a 6.7 percent year-over-year decrease in 2009. The good news is that the market is expected to increase 1.5 percent year-over-year from 2009 to 2010.
End-user worldwide sales are expected to decrease 3.1 percent in 2009 over 2008, and overall disk storage capacity is expected to grow at less than 35 percent. External disk storage systems capacity is expected to grow 44 percent in 2009, which is a shift from traditional 50 to 60 percent annual growth that was seen in previous years.
IDC described 2009 as appearing to be very weak, but the demand for external disk storage systems over the next five years will remain healthy because of the vast growth of digital information. The five-year compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013 is expected to be 1.9 percent, reflecting the market’s recovery. This assumes the annual cost per gigabyte declines by about 30 percent over the same time period, IDC noted.
“We expect data generation worldwide will slow only a little over the next five years,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research manager of storage systems at IDC, in a statement. “However, we do expect a slowdown in the growth of new storage systems capacity shipments. The economic crisis is the most powerful driver for this slowdown in the short-term. Longer-term, a moderate contraction in capacity shipments is expected as technologies that help to increase storage utilization or reduce amounts of data that need to be stored are increasingly adopted.”
The expectations were laid out in IDC’s Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Forecast.
“We expect the network disk storage systems market (NAS combined with Open SAN) will have an insignificant decline worldwide in 2009, and actually grow in some of the mature and emerging regions,” said Lindsey Varney, research analyst for the IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Tracker, in a statement. “Looking forward, it is anticipated that the network disk storage system market will continue to grow steadily through 2013, fueled by continuously high growth in the iSCSI SAN market.
Additionally, after declining in 2009, the Open SAN market will regain its vigor in 2010 and beyond.”
This story was originally published in eChannelLine (www.eChannelLine.com).
