FRAMINGHAM, MA – Worldwide enterprise storage systems vendor revenue increased 19.4% year-over-year to $14 billion during the third quarter, says International Data Corp. Total capacity shipments were up 57.3% year-over-year to 113.9EB.

Revenue generated by ODMs selling directly to hyperscale data centers increased 45.8% to $3.9 billion compared to the third quarter of 2017. This represents 27.7% of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter. Sales of server-based storage increased 10.1% year-over-year to $3.8 billion in revenue. This represents 27.3% of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market was worth roughly $6.3 billion during the quarter, up 12.5% from the same period last year.

"The third quarter results show a continuation of growth realized through the first half of 2018, driven by an ongoing infrastructure refresh cycle, investments in resource intensive next-generation workloads, and expanded use in public cloud services," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies. "Enterprises appreciate the value that data bring to their operations, client engagement, and innovation initiatives. As a result, there is ongoing investment in storage systems that support efficient data consumption and dissemination."

Dell was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 19.2% of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue, growing 21.8% year-over-year. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier, with 16.4% share of revenue on a year-to-year decline of 3.3%. NetApp generated a 5.8% share of total revenue, making it the third largest vendor during the quarter. This represented 15.3% growth over the same quarter in 2017. Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, and Inspur were all statistically tied for the number 4 position, with shares of 3%, 3%, 2.9%, 2.6%, and 2.2% respectively. As a single group, storage systems sales by ODMs directly to hyperscale data center customers accounted for 27.7% of global spending during the quarter and grew revenue by 45.8%, says IDC.

Dell was the largest external enterprise storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 31.3% of worldwide revenues. NetApp finished in the number 2 position, with 12.8% share of revenue during the quarter. HPE/New H3C Group was the third largest, with 10.4% share of revenue. Hitachi and IBM rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie, with 6.4% and 6.2% market share, respectively.

The total all flash array (AFA) market generated more than $2.15 billion in revenue during the third quarter, up 39.3% year-over-year. The hybrid flash array (HFA) market was worth slightly more than $2.6 billion in revenue, up 16%.