The total worldwide enterprise storage systems factory revenue grew 34.4% year over year during the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18) to $13.0 billion, according to IDC (www.idc.com). Total capacity shipments were up 79.1% year over year to 98.8 exabytes during the quarter, notes the research group.

Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters increased 80.4% year over year in 1Q18 to $3.1 billion. This represented 23.9% of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter. Sales of server-based storage increased 34.2% year over year, to $3.6 billion in revenue. This represented 28.0% of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market was worth $6.3 billion during the quarter, up 19.3% from 1Q17.

“This was a quarter of exceptional growth that can be attributed to multiple factors,” says Eric Sheppard, research vice president, Server and Storage Infrastructure. “Demand for public cloud resources and a global enterprise infrastructure refresh were two important drivers of new enterprise storage investments around the world. Solutions most commonly sought after in today’s enterprise storage systems are those that help drive new levels of datacenter efficiency, operational simplicity, and comprehensive support for next generation workloads.”

Dell Inc was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 21.6% of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue and growing 43.0% over 1Q17. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier with 17.7% share of revenue. This represented 18.3% growth over 1Q17. 

NetApp generated 6.8% of total revenue, making it the third largest vendor during the quarter. This represented 21.7% growth over 1Q17. Hitachi and IBM were statistically tied as the fourth largest suppliers with 3.6% and 3.0% respective share of revenue during the quarter.