All-flash and hyper-convergence star in HPE and NetApp financials
All-flash storage lines hit high revenues and growth rates for HPE and NetApp in their latest quarter results. Hyper-converged infrastructure also does well for HPE, but NetApp keeps mum
HPE’s storage revenues hit a record $975m in the first quarter of its 2019 financial period – a 17th successive quarter of storage growth. All-flash arrays were a highlight performer, with revenues that grew 20% for the quarter.
That was way ahead of storage overall, which registered 3% growth on the previous quarter.
That all-flash growth comes courtesy of the Nimble storage array line, acquired by HPE in 2017. But that performance by Nimble means other HPE storage revenues – most notably in its 3PAR enterprise storage line – have seen shrinkage.
Total quarterly revenues for HPE were $7.56bn, of which the $975m storage revenue accounts for 12.9%.
HPE’s converged (Synergy) and hyper-converged infrastructure (SimpliVity) product lines saw growth of around 70%, which puts revenue at around $250m a quarter.
NetApp released its third-quarter results in late January, which showed revenue growth similar to HPE at 2% and a total of $1.56m for the three months previous.
That growth in revenue is, however, lower than that recorded in its results for the year to October 2018, which was at 7%.
For NetApp also, all-flash revenues were a star performer, with NetApp predicting a run-rate of $2.4bn and growth of 19% for the financial year.
NetApp doesn’t break out its hyper-convergence revenues in its results so it’s not possible to compare. What we can say is that NetApp was late to enter the hyper-convergence market and is possibly playing catch-up.
According to IDC’s tracker of external enterprise storage systems in December 2018, NetApp and HPE held second and third spots respectively for market share, with 12.8% and 10.4%. Dell came top with 31.3%. Hitachi and IBM were fourth and fifth, with 6.2% and 6.4% respectively.
The total all-flash array market stood at $2.15bn in revenue terms in the third quarter of 2018, up 39.3% year on year, said IDC. The hybrid flash array market was worth slightly more than $2.6bn in the same period, up by 16% on the year before.
Read more about storage supplier financials
- The big five take 50% of the enterprise storage market, with Dell EMC and HPE dominating. But some struggle with successive quarters of shrinkage, while others see storage shine.
- NetApp records healthy year-on-year revenue increase with flash showing out well, while Pure Storage sees incredible earnings for its flash products over 12 months.
