Gartner networked storage suppliers: Behold the Reg spaghetti-graphic Gartner’s worldwide external controller-based disk storage numbers have come in - and we’ve graphed them for all the quarters since the start of 2011. Some caveats: These external controller box numbers include disk and solid state drives. We calculated percentage shares and any errors are ours. Hitachi/HDS revenue …
Why does El Reg only analyze the revenue charts from IDC/Gartner and not the capacity shipped charts?
If one company ships 1PB of storage for $10M and another ships 2PB of storage for $5M. Who actually sold more?
When I was a customer i didn't care about how much a revenue a company made on what they sold other than to see who is more expansive. As a customer what is equally if not more important is how much storage they actually shipped, as that actually shows how much of their product customers are buying and which ones might be worth considering. Revenue just shows how much vendors convinced customers to pay for their product. How about showing both sides of the story?
I think the problem with that is that you dont compare apples with apples if you go for capacity shipped either. HPs 3Par claim you need less disk than an equivilent EMC array because it has more efficent 'thin' technologies, and then Netapp will come along and say 'I can dedupe all that and sell your 50% of the disk of the 3par to do the same job. Admittedly this is not an entirely accurate example, but the point is that neither revenues nor shipped capacity are a particulay good measure of the of the company or product. Even no. unique customers per vendor could be skewed towards to the vendor with the biggest marketing and sales team as opposed the better products.
Its blimin difficult and means lots of research, of which this is a fairly meaningless marketing statisic..
Well, these are Market Share slides. They are more for investors. However capacity shipped can be a good metric, but that can also be skewed. IBM used to show storage capacity sold and included tape capacity. HP did similar things, but included PC drives in that count. As a customer, I would look to number of clients in the past 18-36 months in your industry/use case. A single EMC isilon deal of 500TB could outweigh five 100TB deals for smaller customers if you only went on capacity shipped. Also, various vendors use different data protection schemes (mirrored/software raid/hardware raid) or even employ data reduction technologies that would also skew those numbers greatly.
I find it quite amazing that The Register feels it has a right to report on such subjects, with questionable taste in accepting how storage sales are measured, but that it hasn't even got decent editorial reviews and checks in place.
Not only is the chart reading backwards but the purple line is missing a name in the key!
Are we meant to 'guess' that company...?
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