This IDC study provides a comprehensive review of the worldwide disk storage systems market in 2006 and the two preceding years. The analysis focuses on various segments of the disk storage systems market, including external versus internal storage, different installation environments such as SAN and NAS, and various operating environments. The study provides market share data for the top 32 disk storage system suppliers in these market segments as well as brief overview of each of the vendors included in the study.

"The year 2006 marked another strong period for the disk storage systems market. The market grew at 6.6% in 2006, from $23 billion to $24.5 billion in factory revenue," said Natalya Yezhkova, research manager in IDC's Storage Systems group. "As businesses become more spread geographically and need to share or transfer data between multiple servers or locations, they continue to adopt network storage. As a result, in 2006, for the first time, shipped capacity of network storage systems exceeded shipped capacity of direct-attached storage (internal and external combined) and accounted for half of all terabyte shipments."