Dell Takes Lead In Windows/Linux External Storage Market

In the first quarter of calendar year 2008, Dell for the first time has captured a 20.4 per cent of the open systems (Windows/Linux) external worldwide disk array storage market with $422 million in revenue. Its closest competitor claimed 18.5 per cent share and $384 million in revenue.

Dell’s external controller-based storage revenue increased 21 per cent year-over-year, and Dell gained share in iSCSI-based SANs to take the number one position with more than twice the revenue of the next leading vendor. This growth demonstrates strong momentum in all segments of Dell’s worldwide storage business.

“We believe taking the lead in the Windows/Linux external storage market is significant. We have invested heavily in our portfolio across the board,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Enterprise Storage. “This is the high-growth segment, and we plan to continue demonstrating leadership throughout our entire family of storage systems, including PowerVault, Dell/EMC and EqualLogic.”

This explains, in part, why Dell shipped over 116 petabytes in external disk storage for Windows/Linux servers in Q1, representing 95 per cent of the total of 122 petabytes of external disk storage Dell ships each quarter.

“That is an astounding amount of storage capacity,” said Thomas. As a comparison, it is estimated by some that the total printed matter contained by all US academic research libraries equals only two petabytes. All told, Dell ships more than an estimated 288 petabytes of total disk storage each week within all of its products – including servers, desktops, laptops and enterprise storage systems – in order to accommodate the demand for storage in the digital universe.