Texas T Rex Dell: Terabytes shipped. Count 'em and weep...

We're king of the storage world

Dell sold more storage capacity than any other supplier in the first half of 2014, says analyst IDC.

In IDC's worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker reports Dell is singled out as having sold 4,311,728 terabytes of disk storage, 4.3 exabytes, by the mid-point of 2014 – pretty damned impressive.

We're told that Dell storage shipments were up 14.8 per cent compared to a year ago, while EMC's went down -7.7 per cent, HP -6.2 per cent and IBM -7.8 per cent.

The terabytes shipped numbers IDC recorded were:

• Dell - 4,311,728
• EMC - 4,076,546
• HP - 3,428,016
• NetApp - 2,725,513
• IBM - 1,641,182
• Others - 3,003,154

Dell storage man Alan Atkinson has blogged about this, saying the Dell total "equates to more than 57,000 years of continuously running high definition video". Ugh! What a nightmarish prospect.

If we look at IDC's tracker numbers for suppliers' revenue from total disk storage sales, we get a contrary picture. Here are IDC's percentage revenue share numbers for the first two quarters of 2014;

• EMC – Q1 = 22.14 per cent, Q2 = 22.7 per cent
• HP – Q1 = 15.1 per cent, Q2 = 17.5 per cent
• IBM – Q1 = 10.1 per cent, Q2 = 12.9 per cent
• Dell – Q1 = 11.9 per cent, Q2 = 11.4 per cent
• NetApp – Q1 = 11.7 per cent, Q2 = 9.8 per cent
• Others – Q1 = 28.8 per cent, Q2 = 25.8 per cent

Dell was third in the first quarter and fourth in the second, from which we conclude that Dell sells its terabytes of capacity for a lot less than EMC, HP and IBM – even than NetApp.

This terabytes shipped lead is great news for Dell, especially as the momentum is positive.

It's apparent, though, that to get a greater share of total disk storage revenues Dell will have to sell a great deal more storage and/or raise its prices. ®