Sales of external controller-based (ECB) disk storage plummeted by almost 16% in the second quarter of 2009 due to the downturn impacting enterprise IT projects, according to analyst Gartner.
"The year-on-year double-digit decline of 15.7% primarily resulted from the economic downturn and longer sales cycles," said Donna Taylor, principal research analyst for Gartner's global Storage Quarterly Statistics programme.
EMC maintained its No.1 position with 23.7% revenue market share. IBM was placed second with 15.7%, and Hewlett-Packard came in third with 10.3% of the market. Dell was fourth with 9.2%, followed by Hitachi/HDS with 8.7%t. NetApp and Sun Microsystems placed sixth and seventh, respectively, with 8.5% and 4.5% market share.
Taylor said: "A bright spot in the disk array market has been in Network Attached Storage, which experienced a 3.5% year-on-year growth rate in the second quarter of 2009."
EMC recently boosted its virtualisation strategy with the acquisition of FastScale, which focuses on cloud-based infrastructure.
