Technology heavyweights Hewlett Packard Enterprise, EMC, and Dell still lead when it comes to selling storage systems for data centers, according to a report from IDC released on Friday.
However, white-label manufacturers in Asia that sell specialized gear directly to big web companies like Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) are growing sales faster than the bigger storage industry stalwarts.
Third quarter sales of data center storage gear grew 2.8% to $9.1 billion, according to IDC.
EMC (EMC) led the pack with $1.7 billion in sales, representing 18% of the storage market. However, its total sales fell 8% drop from the $1.8 billion the company brought in the previous year.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) came in second with $1.5 billion in sales, a 16% year-over-year gain. The company’s market share rose two percentage points to 16.3%. The IDC report did not explain the jump, but CEO Meg Whitman did recently say that a new storage system based on flash grew quickly in its last quarter.
Meanwhile, Dell, which is acquiring EMC, came in third with $900 million in sales, a nearly 2% decline from the same period last year. It had a market share of 9.9%.
As a group, white-label manufactures, which include Taiwan-based manufacturers Quanta and Wistron, took in nearly $1.3 billion in sales in the third quarter, or 23% higher. The IDC report attributed the big gain to giant web companies increasingly buying from generic manufactures that can build customized storage systems for big clients.
The big takeaway is that companies are spending less on traditional storage gear containing spinning discs and the big web companies are turning to more flexible storage technologies for their massive data centers.
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