Dive Brief:
- IDC says revenue for storage manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent in the second quarter.
- Meanwhile, the market for traditional external storage systems has slowed.
- Smaller enterprises aren't buying many systems from these vendors yet, but the trend toward hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry, said IDC.
Dive Insight:
Large Internet companies and service providers now often buy storage capacity -- usually from low-profile vendors -- in the form of generic hardware controlled by software. And as more companies buy cloud-based services, that business is growing, according to IDC. Meanwhile, sales of external systems like SANs were down 3.9 percent last quarter.
IDC analyst Eric Sheppard said the trend is toward overarching virtualization systems that aren't tied to hardware. Sheppard said he expects this trend to continue growing over the next five years.
Overall, the need for greater storage is expected to continue to grow as companies generate an increasing river of data -- traditional storage approaches don’t appear to be able to keep pace. Demand for storage grew strongly last quarter, with 37 percent more capacity shipped compared with a year earlier.
