Enterprise External Storage Market Revenue Increased 9.7 Percent in 2Q21

Global market revenue for enterprise external OEM storage systems grew 9.7% year over year to $6.9 billion during the second quarter of 2021 (2Q21), according to IDC. Total external OEM storage capacity shipped was up 27.9% year over year to 22.1 exabytes during the quarter.

Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters declined by 7.7% year over year in 2Q21 to $6.4 billion, while capacity shipped grew 13.8% year over year to 88.7 exabytes. Shipments for the entire market increased 25.2% to 156.1 exabytes.

"The external storage systems market recovery observed during first quarter of 2021 continued even stronger during the second quarter," said Zsofia Madi-Szabo, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "The degree to which demand returned was highly influenced by the rate at which each regional economy has recovered from the difficulties associated with the global pandemic.

Dell was the largest external enterprise storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 26.8% of worldwide revenue. HPE/H3C) was the second largest supplier during the quarter with 10.9% of revenue. NetApp and Huawei tied for third place with 9.9% and 8.9% of total revenues, respectively. Three vendors, Hitachi, IBM, and Pure Storage, tied for fifth place in the market with shares of 4.9%, 4.7% and 4.1%, respectively.