Canadian Disk Storage Systems Revenues Drop During Turbulent Fourth Quarter: IDC

March 17, 2009

Toronto, Ontario, March 17, 2009 – "Despite increased demand for capacity across virtually every market segment, increasingly affordable technologies allowed Canadian organizations to satisfy their storage needs on reduced budgets," said Dave Pearson, storage research analyst at IDC Canada. "The cost per gigabyte of storage fell more than 30% in 2008, and organizations continue to make the most of their existing capacity."

According to IDC Canada's Storage Tracker results for the fourth quarter of 2008, Canadian external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a 11.2% year-over-year decline. While total Canadian storage capacity was up 20% for the quarter and 37% for the year, total Canadian storage revenues were down 16.2% to $165M year-over-year. "Emerging technologies such as Cloud Storage have yet to make a significant financial impact on the Canadian storage landscape, but virtualization and optimization technologies such as deduplication have become mainstream, and will be essential offerings in 2009-2010," said Mr. Pearson.

IBM maintained their Canadian market share lead in external storage, followed by HP, Dell, and EMC. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Sun Microsystems rounded out the top 6. Among the top suppliers, Dell and HDS saw the strongest year-over-year revenue growth in Q408 at 14.3% and 8.3% growth respectively.

iSCSI was the only storage technology to see gains in the quarter, with 14.7% increase in revenue. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) was hardest hit among storage technologies, falling 25% both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. "Enterprises looking to control costs during late 2008 looked to alternatives to more expensive Fibre Channel SAN by taking advantage of iSCSI and NAS, two technologies that offer increasingly sophisticated feature sets with lower initial costs than traditional SAN," said Mr. Pearson.

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