External Enterprise Storage Market Revenue Grew 2.1 Percent in 3Q25

The external OEM enterprise storage systems (ESS) market grew 2.1% year-over-year (YoY) in the third quarter of 2025, reaching $8.0 billion in vendor revenue, according to IDC. From a historical perspective, this level of growth is solid for the mature ESS market, but it is still eclipsed by the high double-digit growth in the server market, which is driven by investments in accelerated server infrastructure.

Revenue associated with All Flash Arrays showed more dynamic growth by growing 17.6% YoY, while Hybrid Flash Arrays and Hard Disk Drives Arrays declined 9.8% and 6.3%, respectively. “The penetration of AI-infused applications and AI models into corporate data centers will increase the need for more dedicated and efficient enterprise storage systems. IDC expects growing demand for flash storage to support projects related to artificial intelligence, both for training and inferencing,” said Juan Seminara, research director, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.

When slicing the market by price bands groups, the fastest growing portion was Midrange (systems with average selling price from 25$K to 250$K) that showed 8.1% growth in the quarter that already represents 67.5% of the total external storage market, while High End (systems more than 250$K) declined 9.0% and Entry (systems less than $25K) decrease by 8.0%.

Regional view shows disparate performance with double-digit growth in Japan, Canada, and EMEA that grew 14.4%, 12.6%, and 10.5% respectively- PRC and APeJC showed single-digit growth of 9.5% and 8.6% while Latin America barely decreased by 0.9%. The negative note of the quarter was the USA performance, which showed a 9.9% decrease compared to the same quarter of 2024 after a weak performance in the OEM market.

Despite a single-digit decline, Dell led the External ESS market with 22.7% revenue share while focusing more on core products, and Huawei reached second place with 12.0% revenue share, fueled by a very strong performance in the PRC market. NetApp finished third with 9.4% share, thanks to a solid performance in AFA. Pure Storage reached fourth place with 6.8% share due to a double-digit growth in the quarter. Finally, Hewlett Packard Enterprise was fifth with a 5.6% market share.