Analyst Research: Dell was No. 1 in Total Storage Capacity Shipped for 2014

I’m thrilled to share that according to the industry analyst firm IDC, Dell is the No. 1 vendor by capacity shipped for the OEM-Based Disk Storage Systems Market (internal and external storage) in 2014 and the only vendor to ship more than 10 exabytes of capacity 2014[1]. Dell also had the highest year over year 1H2014 revenue growth among the top five hybrid flash storage array vendors ranked by IDC[2]. This is not just great accomplishment, but also a strong validation for our strategy and investment in our storage portfolio.

Last year was a fantastic year for us. In my previous post last September, I shared our success about the first half of the year.  And here is the conclusion, in addition to being the leading storage vendor in total terabytes sold (internal and external) in 2014[1], we were also the No. 1 provider of external DAS storage in terms of revenue during past two years[3] and the No. 1 iSCSI-attached external storage vendor in revenue, a spot we’ve held for 26 of the last 28 quarters[4]!

As a customer centric company, we are constantly innovating to evolve our products to meet the storage needs of our customers. So as the lines between traditional servers and external storage blur, we continue to strategically invest in technologies like Fluid Cache for SAN, converged and hyperconverged infrastructures and software-defined storage to best support businesses and organizations today as well as to help them become future ready.

Last year, we launched the Dell XC series of Web-Scale Converged Appliances, powered by Nutanix, the hyperconverged market leader according to IDC’s report. We have already started shipping our second generation, XC 2.0, which includes our 13^th Generation server technology. This hyperconverged compute-storage solution benefits customers with virtualized workloads, including desktop virtualization, private cloud and big data analytics, to scale and simplify the complexity of managing storage for virtualized environments. It also can cut costs by up to 27% and increase time to value by 6X compared with white box solutions, according to recent analysis from Wikibon.

We also emerged as a driving force for redefining the economics of enterprise storage and, in particular, for mid-tier arrays, the largest growth storage class for Q4 2014 OEM-based storage sales according to IDC. Last June, we introduced the Dell Storage SC4020, our highly automated, high-performance, flexible and easy-to-manage array is designed to be cost-effective for the mid-tier market. With a TCO 43% to 54% lower than its competitors, the SC4020 also has an outstanding performance on VMmark benchmark and has the best price performance of any array selling for under $75,000. Encouraged by the response from our customers, in just a few months, we followed up with SC4020 Entry Level All-Flash array, starting at only $25,000 list price, making it the lowest entry price for an all-flash mid-range storage solution by any major vendor[5]. According to StorageReview.com, this Entry-Level All-Flash (6-SSD/2.88 TB) configuration has very impressive results, matched by no other vendor at this time, and achieves similar benchmark results compared to other all-flash arrays with lists prices of $200,000+.

Amongst others, Dell received the Storage Magazine Quality Awards for Midrange Arrays: Overall Vendor Satisfaction in November 2014. We were also awarded the IT Brand Pulse ‘Innovation Leader for All Flash iSCSI SSD Arrays’ and recognized as the leader in any form of iSCSI storage. We were voted as the No.1 spot across all sub-categories, beating out competitors EMC, NetApp, HP and others, by storage users in a survey conducted by the research firm. Customers also acknowledged our efforts to offer the best price for performance in the industry as we were selected as the overall Price Leader for hybrid SSD/HDD environments and for All-Flash Fiber Channel arrays, iSCSI arrays, NAS and flash management software.

We are very proud of these accomplishments and will continue to focus on driving continued innovation and price leadership in the industry. We also will continue to invest in strategic areas by adapting our product portfolio to the current needs of our customers and partners, while offering solutions that can also support their future needs. So follow us @Dell_Storage on Twitter as we continue to set new benchmarks in the storage industry that can contribute to our customers’ success this year. Here’s to a great 2015!