..market share... graph is strange
The X-axis is the 'wrong' way round, with the latest quarters on the left.
This is not what I expected when I first looked at it.
The global disk storage market shrank 5.6 per cent from the third quarter last year to the third quarter this year, the third quarter of decline in a row. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker says the third 2014 quarter saw total disk storage systems revenue of $7.44bn, compared to $7.88bn a year ago, and …
as a very rough approximation, storage is the integral of disk sales over time, so if sales go down it doesn't mean storage is going down, it just means it's decelerating (not going up as fast as it was).
Moreover as the article pointed out, there are other significant factors like reducing cost of storage and improved efficiency which would allow total storage use to accelerate even if disk sales go down (and yes I know old disks get thrown away but I suspect even that isn't enough to counteract the other factors)
It would be very nice to see this compared against the volumes shipped by the drive manfunacturers, and then also against the volume of storage shipped by use case - SAN, DAS, Internal, NAS, Object etc.
The revenue alone tells us very little as there are so many reasons why this could be that it's of little value, apart from for the storage vendors themselves.
As well as the fact we've run into a bit of a wall the last couple years in terms of hard drive densities, so the 4GB drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, rather than 4GB drives getting cheaper and 6GB and 8GB drives replacing them as had been happening for the previous decade.
And deduplication becoming slowly becoming the norm, instead of something only certain specialized hardware was capable of.