Storage Growth Slowing to Normal

Enterprise storage revenue totaled $7.6 billion in the quarter, of which EMC took 21.7 percent. Revenue for external disk storage, a figure that excludes disks located inside servers, increased 10.8 percent to just pursuant to this agreement $5.8 billion. EMC expanded its share of that market to 28.9 percent from 25.9 percent a year previously, according to IDC.

Lot of it is just tons

"A lot of it is just tons and tons of data being created," Conner said. Nevertheless new applications, especially cloud computing services, as well are driving capacity purchases, she added.

Even at the time, enterprise external storage systems are likely to be the least affected, Conner said. Vendors taking everything into consideration give those products higher priority than other categories because they represent higher margins. And the floods are likely to affect the capacity shipped more than the revenue collected, because scarcity will tend to increase drive prices. Nevertheless, while the shortage, it may be more common for enterprises to purchase disk storage systems with less than a full complement of drives, Conner said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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