[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue totaled $5.5 billion in the second quarter of 2012, a 6.7 percent increase from revenue of $5.1 billion in the second quarter of 2011, says Gartner. The second quarter of 2012 was the 11th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, but fell shy of Gartner’s expectation for a 7.9 percent year-over-year increase.

“Although the hard-disk drive (HDD) supply issues created by the October 2011 Thailand flood was no longer an impediment on meeting user demand, the economy in certain regions had a debilitating impact on vendor revenue in the second quarter of 2012,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. “In particular, the dour EMEA economy dampened year-over-year vendor revenue growth to just 2.6 percent against a forecast of 7.4 percent, while the slowing Asia/Pacific economy held year-over-year vendor revenue growth to 9 percent, 7.1 percentage points lower than Gartner’s forecast. Only the North American region and Japan met or exceeded our expectations in the second quarter of 2012.”

Three vendors — EMC, Fujitsu and Oracle — produced year-over-year revenue gains higher than the industry average. EMC leveraged its optimized-to-fit product strategy to increase its leading ECB disk storage platform market share to 33.3 percent. Fujitsu is benefiting from a rebound in Japan as well as in EMEA where its Fujitsu Technology Solutions subsidiary produced improved results selling the Fujitsu Eternus-branded storage products. Relying on increased sales of the ZFS Storage Appliance, Oracle increased its year-over-year market share for the first time since it closed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in early 2010.