Big Drop In Worldwide External Enterprise Storage Systems Sales

The second category, external enterprise storage systems, focuses on sales of storage in stand-alone systems outside the server.

Here, IDC reported a 2.8 percent drop in total worldwide revenue to $5.2 billion. The decline in sales here was significantly higher, as a percentage, than the drop in total enterprise storage systems because the storage capacity used by hyper-scale data centers typically is inside their servers.

Again, it was Dell EMC, HPE and Hitachi/HDS that saw sales drops, while NetApp and IBM enjoyed a growth in sales. Also interesting was the 6 percent increase in sales by the "others" category, which includes custom-built storage, OEM, and smaller vendors.