Dell has retained its title as the market leader in the storage market, with a share of 19.2%, compared to the second-in-line, HPE with a 16.4% share.
That's according to IDC's Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, which revealed that HPE's market share had dropped by 3.3% compared to the previous year, largely due to Dell's massive growth of 21.8%.
However, it was Hitachi and IBM that took the biggest knocks, with losses of 10.1% and 21% respectively.
Overall, vendor revenues in the worldwide storage market increased by 19.4% year-on-year, led by the increased popularity of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters. This market, in particular, accounted for 27.7% of total enterprise storage investments in the third quarter of the year.
Total revenue for the top 5 companies stood at over $1.4 billion. In the table below, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo and Inspur all tied for 4th place.
| Company | 3Q18 revenue | 3Q18 share | 3Q17 revenue | 3Q17 share | 17/18 growth |
| Dell Inc | $2,695.3 | 19.2% | $2,212.7 | 18.8% | 21.8% |
| HPE | $2,299.3 | 16.4% | $2,377.4 | 20.2% | -3.3% |
| NetApp | $808.2 | 5.8% | $700.7 | 6.0% | 15.3% |
| Hitachi | $427.9 | 3.0% | $475.9 | 4.0% | -10.1% |
| Huawei | $422.0 | 3.0% | $373.7 | 3.2% | 12.9% |
| IBM | $402.7 | 2.9% | $509.9 | 4.3% | -21.0% |
| Lenovo | $370.0 | 2.6% | $190.4 | 1.6% | 94.3% |
| Inspur | $313.3 | 2.2% | $189.5 | 1.6% | 65.3% |
| ODM Direct | $3,887.9 | 27.7% | $2,666.5 | 22.7% | 45.8% |
| Others | $2,420.0 | 17.2% | $2,072.5 | 17.6% | 16.8% |
Revenues are in US$ millions
"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 brings 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."
In the external storage category, Dell also led the leaderboard with 31.3% of the market share thanks to its revenues of $1.9 billion. NetApp's 12.8% share helped it secure second place, while HPE came in third with revenues of $654.3 million and a market share of 10.4%.
