Sun and NetApp gain market share
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Sun showed everyone a clean pair of heels as it grew its external disk storage market share faster than any other vendor in the second quarter of the year according to Gartner. IDC's quarterly disk disk market tracker also shows Sun way out in front.
The Gartner report tracks world-wide external controller-based disk storage revenues for the second calendar quarter of 2008 (Q2 cy'08). There were changes in the rankings of the top 8 vendors: EMC; IBM; HP; Dell; HDS; Sun; and FSC. But while the market grew 18.8 per cent compared to Q2 cy'07 only Sun (34.7 per cent) and NetApp (22.9 per cent) outgrew the market and gained share. The other six vendors all gave up share growing as follows:
- Dell 18.3 percent - HDS 18.1 per cent - EMC 16 per cent - IBM 14.8 per cent - HP 3.4 per cent - FSC -2.8 per cent
FSC's results were possibly related to concerns over its status, with Siemens reportedly wanting to end its support of the FSC joint venture with Fujitsu of Japan.
The collection of all other vendors grew their total revenue at 38.5 percent, more than twice the market rate. We might possibly assume from that surprisingly high growth rate that vendors such as 3Par, Compellent, Data Domain, and Pillar are making good progress at the expense of all other vendors except Sun and NetApp. Gartner identified Compellent as the fastest-growing SAN storage vendor last month.
Gartner reckon that Sun made stellar sales of its StorageTek 2000, 6000 and 9000 series products. Sun has also said that its Sun Fire x4500 'Thumper' hybrid storage/server grew billings 37 per cent year-over-year in that quarter. It retained its top ranking for Unix units shipped for the 19th successive quarter.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
Geographically Japan grew most at 38.7 per cent , followed by Latin America (25.2 per cent), EMEA (22.3 per cent). Asia Pacific (16.6 per cent) and, trailing, North America at 12.7 percent.
The IDC Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for Q2CY08 looks at all disk storage system sales and shows Sun growing factory revenue at 29.2 per cent year-on-year. This is nearly three times faster than the market generally which grew 10.9 percent to $6.9 billion from Q2 cy07. The other vendors' positions and growth in the IDC tracker are unknown outside of IDC and the vendors concerned. Unsurprisingly they are not saying. You can't imagine EMC announcing it ceded market share to Sun, NetApp and assorted vendors in the other category.
There'll be a smile of Jonathan Schwartz' face and a frown on Joe Tucci's as he asks, "Why are we giving revenue away to the pony-tailed one's sales teams when we've got this great kit?" Perhaps its time to winnow out the lowest-performing 10 percent of EMC's sales reps as the company is reputed to have done in the past. Mark Hurd and Sam Palmisano could also be looking askance at the Gartner numbers too. Maybe there will be a Jonathan blog in which he explains how they should be selling disk storage.®
COMMENTS
RE: zvonr
"....And I disagree with you that Solaris is slow and I will give a simple scenario: after a power outage ext3 will require a fsck while ZFS does not, and as a result Solaris will come up a lot FASTER, increasing system availability...." Sorry, I work with highly available systems, where we design it such factors as redundant power, UPSs, etc, distance clustering to a remote site, areas where HP-UX and the HP product range shine. If your business stops because of a power outage then I assume it's pretty low-level stuff.
"....to avoid Redhat Oracle finger pointing.... I always had a good experience with Sun support, I never had a problem they have not been able to fix...." Well, did you have the one where your built-in Broadcom ethernet adapters didn't work, and Sun took two weeks to confirm what you were telling them, then they tried to blackmail you into signing a confidentiality contract BEFORE they would give you the fix? Believe me, you have never seen Sun kit ejected from a building as fast as when the CEO found out! As for finger-pointing, I have sat in meetings where Oracle staff have finger-pointed at each other. The answer is to always go to such meetings armed with enough evidence to be able to say "no, the problem is here and you need to fix it".
"....HP disappointed me when I needed to pay a 1000$ license fee to have software mirroring on my PARISK workstation a while ago...." MirrorDisk on a PA-RISC workstation? Couldn't you afford a server for the job? Yes, HP charges for their proprietary mirroring software, just like Veritas does for Volume Manager. Maybe now wouldn't be a good time to tell you that the free rsync software works on hp-ux just fine? In fact, there's no need to even go and download it as it's bundled on the Internet Express CD set in the OS media pack. I'm assuming you had a real need for the bullet-proof mirroring given by MirrorDisk and rsync couldn't do the job (did you need the three-way mirroring feature?), so I suppose the $1000 was well spent.
Can we have a pointing-and-laughing icon, please?
Response to Mr. Matt
Mr. Matt Bryant I don't assume anything, I am only presenting my opinion, just like you do, however without making disparaging remarks.
Calling Solaris Slowaris is not an argument and will not enforce whatever you say.
And I disagree with you that Solaris is slow and I will give a simple scenario: after a power outage ext3 will require a fsck while ZFS does not, and as a result Solaris will come up a lot FASTER, increasing system availability.
I have developed and deployed software on OS/2, AIX ,Windows, HPUX, Solaris, Linux, and all I can say that every OS has/had its merits. I also find the X86 architecture very hard to love from a technical point of view, but it does show how important backward compatibility and volume is.
If you buy the hardware and the OS from the same vendor you will always get better support, right now you can add MySQL to the stack. If I have to run Oracle on Linux I will always go with the "unbreakable" Linux from Oracle to avoid Redhat Oracle finger pointing.... I always had a good experience with Sun support, I never had a problem they have not been able to fix ...
Obviously Sun disappointed you, just like HP disappointed me when I needed to pay a 1000$ license fee to have software mirroring on my PARISK workstation a while ago... however I don't go around and post disparaging comments about HP...
@ David Halko
David, your three statements...
1. You can't gain in Market Share, out-grow the Market, and STILL be dying at the vine!
2. Once again, if SUN is shipping more UNIX boxes than any other vendor, they are not dying at the vine.
3. SUN is also increasing their Linux and Windows share - it is just a matter of time before they stabilize.
1 and 2 .
Yes you can - if you're selling at a loss! Are they expecting to make it up on volume? I'm not saying that Sun is, but it's certainly possible.
3. Who says they are increasing Linux/Windows market share? The two authorities in the industry - IDC and Gartner - don't.
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