EMC and HP were near-tied for number one in storage last quarter, with around 20 per cent of the market a piece, according to figures from IDC. It's HP that's making the running though, with double-digit factory revenue growth compared to EMC's 3 per cent.

IBM held on to third with 13.2 per cent, with Hitachi, Dell and Sun in a tussle for fourth with between 7 and 8 per cent each. Hitachi made the most ground, adding 17 per cent to its sales total.

The storage industry overall swelled another 6 per cent year-on-year in the last quarter. Worldwide total revenues hit $5.9bn and overall capacity rocketed 51.5 per cent, with 704 petabytes shipped. Vendors have boosted their product ranges lately, presenting buyers with gear closer to requirement.

IDC storage program manager Brad Nisbet said: "The disk storage systems market as a whole is well-poised to satisfy the expected data growth associated with an expanding set of customer needs."

EMC still leads the way in NAS, swallowing 26.2 per cent of revenues ahead of HP's 21.1 per cent. The wider NAS market for Q2 was 11.4 per cent bigger than in 2005.

IDC storage research manager Natalya Yezhkova said: "The double-digit growth in the network disk storage systems market was driven by performance of the NAS and iSCSI SAN segments. As end users become more confident in the reliability and applicability of NAS and iSCSI technologies, they are deploying bigger and more expensive systems, shifting suppliers' revenue distribution toward higher pricebands." &reg