Storage systems market on the rise

That change, an improvement over the first quarter, was mainly due to double-digit growth in network-attached storage, or NAS, systems, IDC said Friday. This segment grew 16.1 percent to $2.5 billion.

EMC, with $807 million in revenue, retained its position as the top standalone storage systems company. EMC also grew its market share to 21.2 percent from 21 percent a year ago. But honors for the strongest growth in the quarter went to Dell, which grew 27 percent to move up to the fourth position with 8.3 percent share in the revenue stakes. Its market share a year ago was 7.1 percent, which positioned the company fifth after Hitachi.

Hewlett-Packard and IBM remained in the second and third spots, with HP growing 13.7 percent to $717 million and Big Blue growing 13.4 percent to $527 million. For all four companies, growth came mainly from their midrange storage products.

"The high growth for external systems represents continued investment in networked storage, while the growth in internal storage indicates richer configurations and increased sales of servers with three or more hard disk drives," IDC analyst Brad Nisbet said in a statement.

In the network storage market, EMC maintained its No.1 position with a 27.9 percent share of revenue, followed by HP, which had 21.3 percent share. Dell and IBM saw 33.2 percent and 22.9 percent growth, respectively.

The overall storage systems market, which includes both standalone and internal systems, grew at a rate of 9.9 percent, raking in total revenue of $5.6 billion in the same quarter, IDC said. HP led the overall storage systems market with 23.5 percent market share. IBM and EMC were second and third, respectively.

Total capacity continued to outpace overall revenue growth, with total petabytes for disk storage systems growing 59.3 percent year over year to 457 petabytes for the second quarter.