Worldwide enterprise storage systems market to return to expected growth rates reaching $37.3 billion in 2015

FRAMINGHAM, USA: The worldwide enterprise storage systems market showed its strength and resiliency by realizing 18 percent growth in customer revenue between 2009 and 2010, after rebounding from the global economic recession.

According to new research from International Data Corp. (IDC), end-user spending on enterprise storage systems reached $30.8 billion in 2010, and the 18 percent growth over 2009 was the highest since IDC started tracking the market in 1993.

"After a tumultuous 2009, one of the major forces driving enterprise storage market growth was recovery in end-user spending in overall IT infrastructure," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems. "The market had a nice bounce off the bottom and carried that momentum through 2010."

As the two-year roller coaster ride comes to an end, growth rates will travel a much less volatile track in the coming years. The enterprise storage systems market will grow at a comfortable 3.9 percent CAGR between 2010 and 2015, and revenues will reach $37.3 billion in 2015. Growth in new terabyte shipments will slow down in comparison to historical rates, hampered by the adoption of various storage efficiency technologies, large installed base of TBs, and growing, albeit slow and deliberate, use of cloud-based storage.

iSCSI SAN and network attached storage (NAS) represent the two fastest growing material installation segments of the worldwide enterprise storage systems market from both the revenue and terabyte perspectives. Spending on iSCSI SAN and NAS will continue to experience strong growth through the forecast period, driven by a major shift of storage deployments toward IP-connected systems.

Additional findings from IDC's research include the following:

* Rich digital content, digitization of industry specific content, and disk-based data protection and archives will create an additional boost for the NAS segment.
There will be a noticeable shift in end-user spending to the entry level and midrange price bands driven by increasing adoption of modular system architectures.

* Emerging market segments and technologies will have a profound impact on the storage systems market landscape in the next five years. Among them are emerging customer segments such as content depots and cloud storage providers, emerging data use cases such as business analytics and medical imaging, and emerging solution bundles such as application appliances.