The
Top 10 Biggest (revenue) STORAGE companies in 2008
note - these are
listed in alphabetic order. |
| company |
products |
notes |
| Dell Computer |
storage
systems
Dell
news |
As
well as being one of the biggest, Dell was also one of the world's fastest
growing storage companies in 2005 - reporting 49% storage revenue growth.
This
is a company which doesn't need any lessons from anyone about how to run a
successful storage systems business.
Are there any threats on the
horizon which could damp its success at commoditizing enterprise storage?
I
doubt it.
Dell's business model is not to innovate computer technology
- but to learn from the market what common factors are needed by the biggest
number of customers and then to make those products available in a safe,
unexciting, easy-to-buy format. That sounds a lot easier than it is to do. Most
IT companies don't manage it and instead are swept along on many currents of
high tech which swirl around and lead nowhere profitable.
Increasing
standardisation of network storage actually makes it easier for companies like
Dell to do business.
And if there's a paradigm shift to something
completely new?
I assume Dell will monitor that - and when demand gets
big enough and homogeneuous enough Dell will offer that on its website too. |
| EMC |
storage
systems and software
EMC news |
EMC
did a superb job of reengineering the company after the dotcom crash - to meet
the new challenges posed by
100+ VC funded storage
startups which wanted to suck its marrow.
In 2004 - EMC emerged as
one of the
fastest growing storage
companies with 35% revenue growth. Although this slowed down in 2005 to
20% - that was still well above the rate for the rest of the RAID storage
industry.
Critical to EMC's continuing success will be the longevity
of its OEM relationship with Dell - which resells EMC storage. The increasing
popularity of disk to disk
backup - which 80% of corporate users in the US and Europe said they would
adopt in various surveys - suggests that demand for big iron storage is not
going to go away.
But doing more of the same will not be enough to
sustain a top 10 listing into 2010.
Two new factors will start to
preoccupy the attention of EMC's biggest customers in the period 2006-2008.
(1)
- compliance solutions
and storage search engines which help users locate legally required documents
fast.
(2) - solid
state disk accelerators - which have price tickets as large or larger than
many high end EMC products.
EMC will have to acquire or work with
companies in those spaces in such a way that the customer still regards their
storage as being EMC. EMC has a good track record at successful acquisitions
and partnerships - but this will give top management a new set of challenges. |
| HP |
services,
optical storage, RAID, tape, storage software etc
HP news |
When
you think about HP's storage business what kind of image comes to mind?
For
me - it's DDR. No, not the Double Data Rate memory that younger readers might
instantly recall - but DDR as in
Deutsche Democratic
Republic - the Eastern part of Germany that was under the Soviet yoke during
1945 to 1989.
DDR had some world class manufacturers, but their
products were always slightly out of date or tired looking. The glitz and specs
weren't the best - but they were solid and built to last. When the Berlin wall
came down - those DDR based industries were mostly unable to withstand the
pressure of a free competitive market.
HP's storage business had
probably been losing its edge throughout the period 2001 to 2003 - but this was
masked by the general IT recession in which most companies suffered, making
comparisons hard. In 2004 and the first half of 2005 - many parts of the
storage market bounced back into double digit revenue growth. But HP bucked the
trend by continuing to report declines in strategic storage segments - even
while the rest of HP's business was doing quite well.
What's the
reason for this?
Superficial analysis might say something like - HP is
too big to manage - or the Compaq/HP
storage merger didn't quite work out as its proponents hoped.
But I
suspect the real cause of HP's failure goes much deeper than that. HP's
strength is also its biggest weakness.
What do I mean by that?
HP's
strength in the enterprise - is that it supports a big legacy of
proprietary operating systems, software and vintage storage systems which it
supports - and probably supports them very well past the natural market death
of those technologies. If you're a customer using legacy storage products which
HP is supporting with new product releases - then you're not going to complain
about that. In fact you are probably delighted. But the sheer complexity of
managing a product matrix which has to work with so much old stuff to avoid
making important customers upset - makes fast product introduction and
innovation impossible.
While new white box companies can bring out
products which just support the latest platform fashions and ignore anything
which came before they sprang into being - the HP storage managers can't. And at
the high end - HP competes with Dell and EMC who are masters at working in open
environments.
So what's going to happen to HP's storage business?
It
won't go away - because legacy customers will still pay to be supported for many
years. But it's not going to catch the fast growth waves either. If it was a
separate business - you'd try and sell it someone else. If you were a venture
capitalist -who owned it - you'd stop funding - and tell the management they
should turn it into a cash cow reseller and services company and stop making new
stuff which is like a Skoda at a Mercedes price. |
| IBM |
storage
services, software, RAID, tape libraries, memory
IBM news |
In
2004 IBM's revenue from storage systems and storage software was over $5
billion. Added to this was a multibillion dollar storage services business. But
the company has been coming under pressure on two fronts:-
on the
hardware side; competition from Dell and EMC, and
on the services
side pressure from other service companies like HP and also the trend to
automate IT services with software.
IBM reacted to these pressures in
Q205 by laying off 13,000 employees to make its services business more
competitive, and signing an agreement to resell NAS systems from
Network Appliance.
I
expect IBM will grow its storage hardware business mostly by reselling and
integrating 3rd party products rather than developing them in-house. IBM is
still one of the world's best known storage brands, and for many specialized
storage OEMs, selling in partnership with IBM and its VARs represents a good
route for getting into the datacenter. |
| Micron Technology |
RAM
and flash
Micron news |
In the
4 quarters leading up to publication of this article Micron reported revenue of
$4.6 billion, an increase of 24% compared to the previous year.
The
RAM market goes from boom to bust every couple of years or so and in April 2005
Semico Research
predicted a decline of 3% for the RAM market in 2005.
I'm not sure
anyone knows exactly where we're we're going to be on the RAM roller coaster
by 2008 - but I think that gigabytes (or terabytes) of
RAM will remain a priority
for PC (and server) speedups for the forseeable future. |
Microsoft
new
entry! |
operating
systems, backup software and storage software
Microsoft news |
Silly
me! I first put Microsoft in my top 10 list in 2001. Then waited a long time
while nothing happened. I forgot that Microsoft isn't an innovative company and
reacts to market changes as fast as a snail dragging a brick across a gravel
drive. But it's a big brick! When the snail gets there, it's hard not to
notice and if you want to park you have to drive the car around.
Unlike
the very public wake up call in December 1995 when Microsoft suddenly realised
the threat posed to it by the web and the dominant (near 100%) position of
Netscape on desktop browsers (which led to the crash development and bundling of
Internet Explorer) Microsoft's reaction to the threat and opportunities posed by
the storage market has been quieter and slower paced.
In the last 4
years Microsoft has been fighting on a number of fronts, in the courts -
anti-trust battles around the world (some of which it won, some of which it
lost), in the server market - against Linux, and in the cellphone market. That
was not a good time to make noises about a really big future opportunity - which
could propel the company outside the PC market and make money (unlike Xbox).
The storage market in 2004 was worth
$70 billion which is
big and hard to miss even if you're Microsoft. It's much bigger than the server
market, although still less than the PC market. The good thing from
Microsoft's point of view, was the absence of a single dominant
challenger in the storage software platform space. (There were some small
companies who burned their
VC money in this very
cause - of establishing a storage software OS - but they
sank a long time
ago.) Whenever Microsoft first looked at the storage software market they
could see it was very fragmented. They could take their time, makes some plans.
And they have done. But their time has now come.
There are two main
areas in the storage market in which Microsoft will generate revenue.
(1)
- Providing the operating system for storage appliances ranging from high end
NAS RAID systems down to handheld video phones.
The ability to provide
a platform which integrates video, data and networking standards from wireless
to fiber in a simple unified way which works with most desktop, server and
handheld applications is the reason that Microsoft already has the dominant
market share in this embedded market. I don't know how much they charge for an
oem license but if you multiply a small amount of money by hundreds of millions
of consumer gadgets and tens of millions of network appliance storage gadgets
(every year!) then even a small license fee starts to mount up.
Microsoft's
integration within storage appliances will also make it easier for servers to
take advantage of low cost storage which is based on Microsoft's OS. That's a
virtuous circle - and not bundling. But it gives users a simpler integration
experience than they would get by say mixing low cost Linux servers with low
cost Windows storage. The Linux servers aren't going to be able to use all those
features. So the embedded storage strategy will help get bigger Windows server
market share from the bottom up.
(2) - Another area where Microsoft
has announced intentions, but not yet shipped commercial products, is in the
network backup market.
I'll mention it, but by itself it wouldn't lead to their inclusion in this
list. The reason? The whole storage software segment in 2004 was worth less
than $6 billion and
you're not going to get the snail out of bed for a share of that pittance.
...Later:-
September
27, 2005 - Microsoft launched its disk to disk backup software solution
called Data Protection Manager - with a competitive attack on slower and more
expensive (tape) based backup software from Veritas/Symantec. DPM is being
bundled into backup appliances from leading hardware vendors. |
Samsung Electronics
new
entry! |
RAM, flash,
hard disks, and solid state disks
Samsung news |
The
world's largest RAM maker, Samsung's 2004 RAM revenue was $7.5 billion,
according to iSuppli. Samsung's flash
revenue in 2004 was $3.9 billion, according to
Semico Research. But its
disk business is the one you should be watching out for.
In Q205 the
company made some interesting announcements. First that it was working with
Microsoft on developing a
hybrid drive
for notebooks which would include both flash and hard disk technology in the
same device to save operating power. (Assuming that Microsoft's OS developers
can deliver a suitable caching scheme.
But more significantly, Samsung also announced it would enter the
solid state disk market in
August 2005, with 1.8" and 2.5" drives aimed at the notebook market
which would offer faster performance than hard disks, lower weight and much
longer battery life. This is the first time in this phase of the SSD market's
development that a multibillion dollar company (Samsung's 2004 revenue was $55.2
billion ) has entered the market. If successful Samsung's SSD business on its
own could be worth billions of dollars on its own by 2008. |
| Seagate Technology |
disk drives
Seagate news |
In the
4 quarters leading up to publication of this article Seagate reported revenue of
$6.73 billion. That was only 4.5% up on the previous year - but in the
most recent reported quarter revenue had increased 42% compared to the previous
year - sign that things were picking up for the battered
hard disk maker.
In
the time frane we're looking at -
flash drives will nibble
away at the low end of the hard disk drive market possibly detsroying any
potential for revenue growth that would come from new applications for HDDs in
consumer gadgets.
Seagate is a survivor. Founded in 1979, and
outlasting nearly 100 serious disk maker competitors in that time, I expect
it will be the very last HDD maker left in business when the day finally
comes (as it will in another decade) that rotating magnetic media ceases to be
a commercially viable form of mass storage.
article:- Flash Memory
vs. Hard Disk Drives - Which Will Win? |
Sun Microsystems
new
entry! |
RAID, Disk to
disk backup, services, tape backup and software
Sun news |
Sun
didn't need IDC's
Q205 Server Market Report to realise that the Linux server market, which it
scorned for so long, had already overtaken Sun's own server market revenue on a
quarterly basis. With an order of magnitude difference in server revenue growth
rates between Sun's own Solaris (2.7%) and Linux (35%), that way ahead did not
offer sufficient growth.
It was already clear from
Sun's moves in 2004
and in an article I
wrote in Q105 that Sun was already picking out a growth path based on
storage and was heading towards $3 billion storage revenue in pursuit of a born
again storage strategy which was markedly different to that which Sun had tried
earlier in the decade
which had failed.
Sun's acquisition of
StorageTek announced
June 2005 added not just $2 billion of storage revenue, but more significantly
within that a billion dollar
storage services
business which could tie all the pieces together for enterprise customers, and a
reputation earned by surviving
36 years in
the ever changing storage market.
In 2004
STORAGEsearch estimated the
worldwide storage market revenue exceeded
$70 billion a
much bigger prize to aim for than the server market - which was about
$45
billion. Sun was a credible supplier of storage systems into the fragmented
Linux market, long before the StorageTek merger. If successful Sun's new storage
business will soon outgrow revenues from its server products, although the large
installed SPARC server base will provide ample opportunities for cash from
services, processor and storage upgrades. |
| ...Later:- |
July
2007 - Sun's performance in the storage market has been very disappointing in
the years since this article was first published.
At a time when
many other top 10 storage companies were reporting over 20% revenue growth (2nd
calendar quarter 2007) Sun reported 10% storage revenue decline.
STORAGEsearch.com was planning to drop Sun from its 2011 top 10 storage list
long before these results. But it would be remiss of us not to signal that
downgrade in status before the new article is published. |
| Toshiba |
DVD drives,
hard disk drives and flash memory
Toshiba
news |
Toshiba's
flash revenue alone (on the order of $9 billion in 2004/5) is big enough to
keep its position comfortable in this list.
In 2004 Toshiba
introduced the world's highest capacity 1.8" and 2.5" hard drives.
In May 2005, Toshiba acquired the US hard disk drive development
unit, from Panasonic, along with about 50 engineers to increase its small form
factor HDD development resources.
Also in May 2005, Toshiba announced
its HD DVD-ROM with a data capacity of 45 gigabytes, demonstrating
continuing leadership in the optical storage market.
The company is
very confident about the future of flash having increased its investments in
more wafer fab capacity which will start churning out products in the 2nd half
of 2005. |
| Western Digital |
hard disk
drives
Western
Digital news |
In the
4 quarters leading up to publication of this article Western Digital reported
revenue of approximately $3.5 billion an increase of 15% compared to the year
before. That makes it the smallest company in this list with slightly lower
current revenue than Maxtor, which exited the top 10.
But unlike
Maxtor, Western Digital has been more successful in getting its drives used in
new consumer markets. About a quarter of its revenue (in calendar Q105) was
derived from non-desktop PC sources.
In January 2005 the company
announced it would launch 1-inch drives. That opens the door to high growth
applications, such as MP3 players, PDAs, digital still cameras and digital video
cameras.
Commenting on this John Monroe, a research vice president
at Gartner said "We are witnessing a global cultural revolution in portable
digital entertainment. Hard-drive enabled MP3 players are already becoming
ubiquitous, and by 2008, at least 8% of mobile phones could contain a hard
drive. These are enormous new markets. It now seems likely that 1-inch hard
drive shipments exceeded 8 million units in 2004, up from only 903,000 units in
2003. The compound annual growth rate for 1-inch hard drives should exceed 85%
through 2008." |
| Editor's
footnote:- if you've been counting you may have noticed this list actually
includes eleven companies and not ten. I've done that a few times in the past
as well to reflect the errors and uncertainties in this type of long range
forcast. For example the Compaq/HP
merger which affected an earlier edition of this article. | |
|
|
New Trends
which will Affect the Market
New high density low cost per
terabyte optical storage will pose a challenge to the position now held by high
capacity hard disk storage. Being unproven in terms of archival longevity, it's
unlikely that the new technologies will replace magnetic storage in the
enterprise, but in the home they will make a dent in hard disk makers' business
plans for the mass storage archive box which will store consumers' movies and
music.
Solid state disk storage will be a 10 billion dollar market
which achieves traction in 2 main applications. In high end servers (helping
to get the fastest
performance from high throughput but flattening Gigahertz clock rate
processors). Also in low end portable consumer products - where cost, weight
and power consumption compared to hard drives will be the decisive factor. In
the notebook market flash SSDs will enable sub 1Kg notebooks to deliver the same
application performance as much heavier (3Kg) portables and desktops - while
using low power Intel processors which run at 1/3 the Gigahertz speed of the
heavier PCs. Therefore we will see SSD storage spending replacing spending in
microprocessors at both the top and bottom end of users' IT budgets.
Compliance
and security products will become a significant size market. But I doubt if
we're going to see a unified all in one product suiting all users emerging.
Today companies in this space offer a confusing range of solutions ranging from
standalone appliances to add-on software. With the wide range of customer data
architectures in place it is likely that the new market will remain fragmented
in many different types of solutions.
Standardisation issues in
storage networking will focus attention on solutions for the emerging networked
home. That will drive down costs for entry level NAS. Eventually the biggest IP
NAS makers will be consumer companies rather than enterprise companies as they
are now. But that won't happen till a couple of years beyond the scope of this
report.
Risks may be posed by some of the newer technologies in
the optical, non volatile memory and magnetic storage markets. With the
compelling need to rush new products to market while their capability envelopes
look competitive and before the ageing characteristics are fully known, it's
possible we'll see some kind of industry wide storage media failure in the next
3 to 4 years - similar to the kind of hiccup caused by Intel's floating point
processor flaws in the early 1990s, or Sun's
flaky
SPARC cache design in 2001.
But unlike those previous industry
scares, a storage media failure on a wide scale won't be as easy to temporarily
fix as a software patch (Intel) or disabling the cache (Sun). Instead a it's
likely that millions of people will lose some data. All the more reason for
data owners to spread their risks, avoid common mode failures and not put
their current and backup data in the same kind of storage bin. Even without
such a disaster, reliability is going to become the hot topic in the
storage industry in the next few years as users learn that internal failure
rates which did no harm when data sets were smaller - can almost guarantee
uncorrectable data corruption when data sets get very large.
We'll
keep you updated of all these developments, real and imaginary, as they happen
in our storage news page.
Companies which dropped out of last year's top 10
list?
To retain a place in the 2008 Top 10 List (compared
to the 2006 list) it wasn't simply enough to report 2005 storage revenues in
the region of $4 billion followed by years of single or low double digit
growth. It was comparison with the expected meteoric growth of the new
entrants to the list which meant that some companies had to drop out. So there
is no discredit to those who dropped out. They may still be significant top 20
companies in $100 billion storage market of 2008 - but that's not what this list
is about.
Hitachi and Maxtor dropped out of the list this year, see
why below.
Hitachi's storage revenues come from 2 main parts, its high
end RAID systems, marketed by
Hitachi Data Systems ($1.2
billion revenue in 2004), and its hard disk drive business
Hitachi GST ( $10.3
billion revenue in 2005). HDS is dependent on other OEMs who resell its
systems, and its revenue failed to meet the industry growth benchmark in 2004.
In contrast the growing success of Dell and EMC make it tough for HDS to find a
gap in which to grow. Hitachi GST has some exciting new products aimed at both
the low end consumer market and the high end 4Gps FC and SAS markets. But even
though I expect to see very high growth rates in HGST's revenue the company is
starting from a low base - and is unlikely to generate the $5 billion plus
revenue it needs to stay in this list.
Maxtor has a very high
dependence on the desktop market (nearly 95% of unit shipments) in Q105. That's
a very competitive market with low long term growth prospects compared to some
other disk segments. This exposure means the company is vulnerable to big PC
OEMs switching to alternative suppliers.In the 4 quarters leading up to
publication of this article Maxtor reported revenue of $3.8 billion, 9% down
on the previous year. The company said in February 2005 it plans to reduce U.S.
headcount by up to 200 over the course of the year. That followed an earlier
reduction in the previous year. ...Later:- in December 2005 - Maxtor
announced it was being acquired by
Seagate | |
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| Squeak!
- the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide |
This
is the 4th annual edition of this very popular report.
The earlier
edition of this article was the most popular
storage article viewed
by STORAGEsearch.com's readers in
the previous year. |
 | |
| The
SSD Buyers Guide
lists all SSD products commercially available in the market by form factor,
interface type and memory technology. It also includes a summary of key
milestones in the SSD market in the past year.
...read the
article, solid state disks | |
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| Squeak!
- SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
| |
| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 412G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
| . |
 |
Sanitization
Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives - article by Intelligent Computer
Solutions
Removing the data on old unwanted disk drives has
become a concern for all users.
This article reviews the various
methods available to sanitize hard disks along with the advantages and
disadvantages in each case....read the article,
...Intelligent Computer
Solutions profile,
disk sanitizers | |
| . |
| Squeak!
- the Fastest Growing Storage Companies |
This
is the 6th annual edition of this popular article, and is compiled from
analyzing the reported results from the top 1,000 storage companies.
The
top 3 companies had over 300% year on year revenue growth.
If
you're looking to team with successful storage companies or want to emulate
their success, this article will tell you who they are and the market segments
they are in. ...read
the article | |
| . |
 |
the Impact
of Compliance on Archival Storage Strategies - article by Plasmon
It's
difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to
the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the
problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should
destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they
stay deleted?
Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you
run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the
data recovery
industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that
Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is
dispersed and disposed of in different types of media.
This article
summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market
technologies. ...
read the article,
...Plasmon profile,
Optical Libraries | |
| . |
 |
the
Dangers of Removable Storage Media - article by Pointsec
In
the early
James
Bond films of the 1960s, viewers were introduced to an array of implausible
(at the time) portable high tech spy gadgets. Nowadays we know from our own
everyday experience that something the size of a cigarette lighter can actually
be a video camera with its own wireless internet access.
The
proliferation of miniature high capacity storage devices creates a serious
problem for commercial and national security. This article provides an up to
date picture of the intrinsic dangers posed by current removable storage
technologies. ...read
the article, ...Pointsec
profile, Security,
Removable Storage | |
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Increasing
Flash Solid State Disk Reliability - article by SiliconSystems
Solid
state disks, based on flash technology, have greatly improved in performance in
recent years and now compete head to head with RAM based accelerator systems.
Flash also has significant advatanges in servers compared to RAM SSDs due to low
power consumption.
But if you think that all solid state disks which
use flash are equally reliable and enduring then think again.
That's
a bit like saying that a Mercedes 300SL sports coupe is as tough as a Tiger
tank because both were made in Germany and both are built out of metal. But as
Oddball (Donald Sutherland) says in the movie
Kelly's
Heroes "I ain't messing with no Tigers."
This article
by SiliconSystems, shows how their patented architecture cleverly manages the
wear out mechanisms inherent in all flash media to deliver a disk lifetime that
is about 4 times greater than of other enterprise flash products and upto 100
times greater than intrinsic flash memory. ...read the article,
...SiliconSystems
profile, Solid state disks | |
| . |
Squeak! -
Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market
Animal
marketing metaphors are popular in service industries, but you'd be surprised
how many companies have used animals in their marketing of data storage
products and services.
The storage market was worth over $150 billion
in 2005, and as it gets bigger - more companies will turn to animal brands to
help differentiate their otherwise bland products and lend them artificial
(or deserving) characters and virtues.
The idea behind this type of
marketing is to suggest positive connotations so it's unlikely that anyone will
choose to associate their products with gremlins. But you may be surprised by
the population of the storage ark.
This reference articles lists all
known companies who have furry marketing brands, and also includes some which
are slimy, scaly and scary too. ...read the article,
Mice in storage |
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