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Storage suppliers’ market share and strategy

We look at the top eight enterprise storage suppliers’ market share, product offer and how they’ve responded to AI, hybrid cloud, as-a-service purchasing and containerisation

Antony Adshead
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Published: 26 Aug 2025

The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French say. That’s certainly the case in enterprise storage.

Here we review the storage supplier profiles published this year on ComputerWeekly.com, and find all the key players building on key themes of the past decade.

These include: flash storage (often QLC for increased density), hybrid cloud operations, storage and backup for containerised apps, as-a-service models of purchasing, and storage for AI workloads.

For each array maker, we look at company history and character, market share and rankings, key storage products, and each supplier’s approach and level of maturity to the cloud, consumption models of procurement, and container storage and data protection.

As in our last survey in 2023, we find players with differing approaches and levels of maturity across all these areas, as well as significant technology refreshes for some suppliers.

While the cloud – and readiness to provide storage there and on-premise – has been a big driver for a few years, recently, the strong trend has been towards support for artificial intelligence processing, and this is reflected in many product technology refreshes.

Data management

Elsewhere, some suppliers – notably NetApp and Pure Storage – have taken the apparently logical step from storage management across the enterprise and the cloud to more explicitly targeting data management.

We also find a new player – Lenovo – which has gone from also-ran to fourth in IDC’s rankings, largely via a strategy of partnering to gain hardware products and a sharp focus on the small and medium-sized enterprises end of the market.

Here are IDC’s external storage system market share rankings for 2023, which were as follows (2022 in brackets):

  • Dell 26.1% (29.6%)
  • Huawei 9.7% (9%)
  • HPE 8.3% (9.9%)
  • Lenovo 7.7% (4.1%)
  • NetApp 7% (8.3%)
  • Pure Storage 6.1% (6%)
  • Hitachi Vantara 4.9% (4.4%)
  • IBM 4.7% (4.4%)

Read more about storage suppliers

  • Dell still tops the pile as it deepens enterprise storage offer: US giant is top dog in revenue and market share as its storage array range – still largely EMC-derived – deepens its cloud, containers and as-a-service options.
  • Huawei rises in the storage ranks despite sanctions and tariffs: Huawei has leapfrogged HPE in revenue and market share and broadened its storage offer towards AI, the cloud and as-a-service despite sanctions and tariffs.
  • HPE storage battles hard and smart in challenging market: We look at HPE, which has slipped in the storage supplier rankings, but brings a full range of AI-era storage over a mature cloud and consumption model offer.
  • Lenovo partners its way up the storage maker rankings: We look at Lenovo, a key storage player that has played the partnership game to rise in the array maker rankings and corner the SME and entry-level market.
  • NetApp market share has slipped, but it has built out storage across file, block and object, plus capex purchasing, Kubernetes storage management and hybrid cloud.
  • Pure Storage profits from all-flash, as-a-service and cloud focus: Pure Storage evolves its all-flash offer across multiple workloads while embracing cloud models in data management, as-a-service and containerisation.
  • Hitachi Vantara: VSP One leads revamped storage portfolio: Block, file and object as part of full-stack IT offer for hybrid cloud and containerised applications comes via VSP One arrays and EverFlex as-a-service options.
  • IBM reorients storage to cloud, containers and as-a-service: We look at Big Blue’s storage offer, which spans file, block and object, on-premise, in the cloud, and mainframes, while also embracing containers and the cloud.
  • Storage explained: Consumption models of storage procurement. We look at consumption models of storage purchasing and how cloud operating models have made them mainstream and supplanted the traditional three-year lift-and-shift datacentre refresh.
  • Storage technology explained: Flash vs HDD. In this guide, we examine the differences between flash storage and HDD, the rise of NVMe and much denser formats such as QLC, and whether or not flash will vanquish HDD in the all-flash datacentre.

Read more on Virtualisation and storage