By Ron Chen, Correspondent ASEAN Region

As per IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker Q3 2020 release, India’s external storage market witnessed a decline of 14.8 per cent year-over-year (YoY) by vendor revenue and stood at US$ 79.9 million in Q3 2020 (Jul-Sep). The majority of the YoY decline in storage spending was due to decreased spending from professional services, government, and manufacturing organizations in Q3 2020.

“Emergence of new-age applications, multi-cloud, edge deployments, etc. are forcing organizations to revisit their enterprise IT architecture. To adapt to this changing IT landscape, enterprises need intelligent, hyper agile, scalable, resilient, and cloud-ready data platforms which are flexible and easy to use,” says Research Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC India, Dileep Nadimpalli.

All-Flash Arrays (AFA) contributed 39.2 per cent to the overall external storage systems market in Q3 2020. Banking, telecommunications, and professional services verticals were the major contributors for AFA demand in Q3 2020. Organizations are very keen on adopting AFA for primary workloads, but we expect AFA adoption even in secondary storage in the near future due to the availability of QLC media which offers better performance and cost advantages as compared to Hard Disk Drives (HDD).

Entry storage systems grew by 3.4 per cent YoY backed by increased spending from the insurance vertical in Q3 2020. High-end and Midrange storage segments witnessed a steep double-digit YoY decline in Q3 2020.

COVID-19 has brought forth multiple challenges for enterprises by forcing them to change their business and IT priorities to align to customers’ demands. We observed organizations considering OPEX based deployments like never before for business continuity requirements and new projects, which is cannibalizing traditional storage demand.

Major Vendors Analysis

Dell Technologies continued to be the market leader in the external storage systems market with a 29.0 per cent market share by vendor revenue, followed by NetApp with a 14.8 per cent market share in Q3 2020.

IDC India Forecast

The external storage systems market is expected to grow at a single-digit compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2019 – 2024 period. IDC forecasts that External Storage Systems spending is expected to significantly drop YoY in CY 2020 due to delayed demand across organizations attributing to COVID-19 impact but expect the market to recover in CY 2021.