IBM surpasses HP in storage hardware sales
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(InfoWorld) - IBM earns bragging rights for surpassing Hewlett-PackardÂ in 2006 storage hardware sales, though it still trails industry leader EMC, according to an industry report published Tuesday. IBM's market share in the global external-controller disk storage market, based on revenue, grew to 15.8 percent in 2006, from 14.5 percent in 2005, while HP's share dropped to 13.1 percent from 14.7 percent. That elevates IBM to second place behind storage market share leader EMC Corp., which grew its market share to 24.8 percent last year from 23.4 percent in 2005. "I think the records will reflect that it's been about 10 years since we passed HP," said Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM storage. As recently as five years ago, HP had a 15-point storage market share lead over IBM. Monshaw credited a refreshed product line, a focus on selling systems rather than individual products and increased selling to the small-to-medium business market for IBM's results. HP Chairman, CEO, and President Mark HurdÂ acknowledged the weaknessÂ in his company's storage business during a presentation at a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Monday. HP's storage revenue grew only 3 percent in its fiscal first quarter, ended Jan. 31, which Hurd attributed to the fact that much of its product line is tape storage, a declining business. However, sales of its EVA line of disk storage products grew 18 percent in the quarter. Hurd also said duringÂ the company's quarterly earnings reportÂ Feb. 20, that HP needs toÂ expand its storage sales force. "We just don't cover enough accounts," Hurd said. The rest of the storage sellers in the Gartner report, ranked by 2006 market share, are the following: Hitachi Data Systems, 9.6 percent; Dell, 7.6 percent; Network Appliance, 7.2 percent; and Sun Microsystems, 6.1 percent. Gartner noted that the storage market is increasingly dominated by the top players and is driven by industry consolidation, more effective marketing and strong channel partnerships. The top seven storage vendors accounted for 84.2 percent of the market in 2006, up from 81. 5 percent in 2006.
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IBM  reported a better- than-expected 24 percent rise in preliminary quarterly earnings on Monday on strong sales in overseas markets, driving its shares up 5 percent and spurring a broader tech rally.
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TechWeb - Hewlett-Packard was tops in shipments and IBM in sales in the third quarter, says Gartner.
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IBM , the world's largest technology services company, on Wednesday posted a higher quarterly profit as revenue rose 9 percent, helped by software-company acquisitions and growth in computer services.
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Sales lull has ended IBM squeaked by Hewlett-Packard to maintain its top position in worldwide server revenue during the first quarter this year, according to a new report.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Competing with Dell Inc. for small business users who need to back up their data, Hewlett-Packard Co. launched a low-priced, disk-based backup and recovery system on Monday. The HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System will automatically save the data from as many as four servers, with total capacity of either 750G bytes or 1.5T bytes. Users can restore lost files within minutes, compared to a process of several hours for a tape-based system, HP said. Most users say that tape-based systems are the most cost-effective method of backing up data, but as new accounting laws demand greater storage regulations, that could soon change, said Adam Thew, marketing director for HP's StorageWorks division. Compared to connecting a direct-attached tape storage device to every server in a business, HP's new disk-to-disk product can reduce the cost of ownership and chance of human error, Thew said during a webcast Monday. The D2D system is designed for small business owners with little IT management experience, offering a simple setup wizard interface, Web-based monitoring, and standard Ethernet cables with iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface). Still, HP says tape-based storage is important for a complete backup system. "D2D will not replace tapes entirely. We do recommend that customers keep a single tape-based system offsite for disaster recovery," Thew said. Dell and its partner EMC Corp. launched a similar backup system on Feb. 20, offering the disk-based CX3-10 SAN (storage area network) array for small and medium businesses. Like HP, Dell says its system works best in concert with tape-based storage, and also launched two new products in its tape library line, the PowerVault TL2000 and PowerVault TL4000. Dell's systems are intended for buyers with larger storage needs and hardware budgets than HP's, with the CX3-10 starting at US$22,000 and the PowerVault libraries starting at 9,300. HP sells the D2D110 model with 750G bytes useable storage capacity for $1,999, and the D2D120 model with 1.5T bytes for $2,999. HP charges $1,000 more to bundle its Data Protector Express software with the products.
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Hewlett-Packard Co.  and  Sun Microsystems Inc.  were among the fastest-growing  data storage providers in the second quarter, while EMC Corp.   and Dell Inc.  lagged overall market growth,  researcher IDC said on Thursday.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ.N and   Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O were among the fastest-growing   data storage providers in the second quarter, while EMC Corp.   EMC.N and Dell Inc. DELL.O lagged overall market growth,   researcher IDC said on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Number two storage systems maker Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has closed the gap between it and number one EMC Corp. to what research company IDC calls "a statistical tie." But EMC argues its lead over HP is greater if co-branded Dell-EMC storage devices are counted as EMC sales instead of as Dell Inc. sales. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Tracker, EMC Corp. held an industry-leading 20 percent market share for external disk storage systems in the second quarter of 2006, followed by HP with a 19.3 percent share. EMC had a 21 percent share to HP's 18.9 percent in the second quarter of 2005. In the latest results, IBM Corp earned third place with a 13.2 percent share, while Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. recorded market share of between 7 percent and 8 percent, which IDC labeled a three-way tie. IDC considers companies to be tied for market share if the difference between them is less than 1 percentage point, said Brad Nisbet, program manager for IDC Storage Systems. The second quarter figures show a tight race between EMC and HP, but EMC spokesman Greg Eden said EMC is further ahead than those numbers suggest. The market share numbers don't count storage devices that EMC manufactures for Dell. They are co-branded as Dell/EMC storage but counted as Dell sales revenue, he said. If Dell/EMC sales were counted as EMC revenue, the company's second quarter market share would be 26.1 percent, Eden said. IDC confirmed that number. However, EMC stumbled in the second quarter when inventory problems prevented it from fulfilling orders for some of its Symmetrix DMX3 high-end and Clarion CX3 midrange storage models. "We had double-digit growth in our bookings for our storage," Eden said, but customers wanted the newer models and were not content to buy the older ones. Manufacturers with the strongest second-quarter percentage growth from a year earlier were Sun Microsystems Inc. (19.1 percent), Hitachi (17 percent) and HP (10.3 percent.). "HP has been executing well under new management," Nisbet said, referring to President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, who replaced Carly Fiorina in March 2005. HP's storage revenue grew by 22 percent in Western Europe in the quarter, he said. Sun reported the strongest quarterly jump due in part to its acquisition of storage vendor StorageTek in 2005 and the development of the first StorageTek disk storage products, Nisbet said, while Hitachi recorded strong sales of its high-end storage products. IDC said the second quarter, which ended June 30, was the 13th consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the external disk storage sector. Revenue rose 8.5 percent to US$4.2 billion, from $3.8 billion a year earlier. Storage demand is growing as enterprises generate more data they have to manage and archive, he said. "Storage continues to be an integral component of a full (IT) solution," Nisbet said.
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IBM held tight to its top ranking for server revenue, laying claim to a 30.7 percent market share in the quarter. HP -- which topped the charts in terms of units shipped -- remained in second place on the revenue list with 27.
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(InfoWorld) - EMC and Symantec missed out on a boom in storage software sales in the second quarter, according to research by IDC. While the worldwide market for storage software grew 8.6 percent from a year earlier, to $2.5 billion, revenue from storage software dropped 3.2 percent at EMC and slipped 1.8 percent at Symantec. EMC remained the market leader, with storage software sales of $654 million and a 26.4 percent share of the market, but its share fell from 29.6 percent in the second quarter of 2005. EMC'sÂ share has been slidingÂ since 2004, according to previous IDC figures. Symantec, in second place, saw sales drop to $468 million and its share of the market slide to 18.9 percent from 20.9 percent a year earlier, according to IDC. SymantecÂ acquired storage software specialist Veritas SoftwareÂ in July 2005: IDC compared Symantec's latest storage software revenue with combined figures for the two companies before the merger. Storage software sales at IBM grew 34.9 percent year on year to $311 million, taking its share of the market to 12.5 percent, from 10.1 percent a year earlier. Network Appliance, in fourth place, grew even faster: its revenue from storage software jumped 57.5 percent to $222 million, giving it 9 percent of the market, up from 6.2 percent. This allowed it to overtake Hewlett-Packard, where storage software revenue slipped 2.7 percent and market share dropped to 5.7 percent from 6.3 percent a year earlier, IDC said. This is the 11th consecutive quarter of growth in storage software sales, IDC said. It attributed much of the growth to demand for storage replication systems, where sales grew 13.2 percent year on year, as companies make good on their disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Demand from archive and hierarchical storage management software (HSM) grew 32 percent, but from a much smaller base. IDC breaks the storage software market down into eight categories: as data protection and recovery; archive and hierarchical storage management (HSM); storage replication; storage management; storage device management; storage infrastructure; file system, and other storage software. (IDC is owned by International Data Group Inc., which also owns IDG News Service.)
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Hewlett-Packard (HP) has reported better than expected quarterly results helped by strong international sales.
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Seagate Technology, the top U.S. maker of computer hard-disc drives, on Tuesday forecast quarterly earnings and revenue above Wall Street estimates amid stronger demand for its products than in the previous quarter.
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprises are reaching deeper into their pockets to add data storage capacity to their computer networks, according to an industry report released Friday. Worldwide revenue for external disk storage systems rose to $4.3 billion in the third quarter of 2006, a 9.9 percent increase compared to the same period last year, according to the research firm IDC. This is the 14th consecutive quarter of storage revenue growth, a trend IDC attributes to more companies buying storage because of the demand to save more data, and to existing customers buying larger capacity systems. "There is definitely a bump in the quarter on the systems side," said Brad Nisbet, manager of IDC's Storage Systems Program. Sales growth has been particularly strong for midrange-priced systems while flat for high-end systems, Nisbet said. While the cost per megabyte of storage has continued to decline, the average selling price of systems has continued to rise because enterprises are buying larger and larger capacity storage. The market share rankings of the top storage vendors were unchanged in the latest report. EMCÂ kept the No. 1 spot with a 21.4 percent share on an 18 percent increase in revenue over the year-ago quarter to $927 million. Hewlett-Packard ranked second with a 17.6 percent share on only a modest 1.8 percent revenue increase to $760 million. Third place went to IBM, with a 13.7 percent share. Dell, which sells co-branded Dell/EMC storage, ranked fourth with an 8 percent share, and Hitachi Data SystemsÂ was in fifth place with a 7.9 percent share. The entire disk storage systems market grew 7.9 percent to $6.186 billion. In the overall market, the top five vendors, in order of share, were HP, IBM, EMC, Dell, and Hitachi. Also of note, the market for storage area network (SAN) technology grew 17.3 percent. The SAN market excludes sales of network-attached storage (NAS), in which servers are liked to just one storage appliance. SAN refers to a larger network of multiple storage devices that are grouped together as a single resource. In particular, storage networks linked together with iSCSI (for Internet Small Computer System Interface) connections showed dramatic growth of 108.4 percent over the third quarter of 2005. IDC attributes that growth to the ease of use and low total cost of ownership of iSCSI-based networks compared Fibre Channel-connected storage. The IDC report excludes sales of tape storage technology.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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HP is the latest to offer a server-storage product targeted to small- to mid-size businesses.
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Looking to grab some momentum and market share from rivals EMC and Hewlett-Packard, IBM took the wraps off a new, midrange storage offering that--in a 3U form factor&quot;-could scale up to 67 terabytes.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is acquiring a storage software company that the company says will give it important leverage in the enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) market. HP on Monday signed a definitive agreement to acquire PolyServe Inc., of Beaverton, Oregon, but did not disclose the terms of the transaction. PolyServe has 117 employees. With PolyServe's software, information from file or database servers can be consolidated into a single, shared pool of storage that is highly available and can be expanded to match business demands, HP said in a news release. PolyServe, founded in 1999, has been an HP partner for the last two years. Its software can run on HP's storage arrays and Proliant servers in Linux and Microsoft Corp. Windows environments. The acquisition also means HP can run PolyServe software on NAS blade servers. Blades are the fastest growing segment of the server industry. HP placed second to EMC Corp. in storage hardware revenue in the third quarter of 2006, according to a report from IDC. HP held 17.6 percent of the worldwide market in the third quarter with sales of US$760 million, while EMC lead with a 21.4 percent share on revenue of $927 million.