A 25% drop in high-end storage spending meant that external disk storage and total disk storage sales respectively fell 5.2% and 6.9% yr/yr in Q1, says IDC.
IBM was a big loser, probably to cloud storage as the high end of the market dropped.
"The poor results of the first quarter were driven by several factors, the most important of which was a -25% decline in high-end storage spending," said Eric Sheppard, Research Director, IDC Storage.
"Other important contributors to the market decline include the mainstream adoption of storage optimisation technologies, a general trend towards keeping systems longer, economic uncertainty, and the ability of customers to address capacity needs on a micro and short-term basis through public cloud offerings."
Those figures follow Q4 growth rates of 2.4% and 1.3%. Market leader EMC, which depends heavily on its high-end Symmetrix line, saw its external share fall 110 bps yr/yr to 29.1%, and its total share fall 50 bps to 22.4%.
EMC previously reported that its high-end sales fell 22% in Q1; strong flash/scale-out storage sales partly offset the drop. NetApp's low high-end exposure allowed its shares to grow 30 bps and 50 bps to 15.1% and 11.7%, in spite of a 2.8% revenue drop. HP's external share rose 40 bps to 8.8% (through its brand 3PAR's strength), but its total share fell 20 bps to 15.1% (mainly on server weakness).
Things still look bleak for IBM, which reported a 23% yr/yr Q1 system storage revenue drop: Its external share fell 200 bps to 8.8%, and its total share 180 bps to 10.1%.The total disk share of non-top-5 vendors rose 370 bps to 28.8%.
Chalk that up to both surging demand for cloud storage (getting cheaper by the quarter) running on commodity hardware, and momentum for flash/hybrid storage upstarts such as Nimble and Nutanix.