China's Distributed Storage Market: Size, Structure, and Growth Trends

Definition of Distributed Storage

Distributed storage is a system built on a distributed architecture, composed of multiple hardware‑software coordinated storage nodes that provide storage services over a network. Compared with traditional storage, data is spread across independent nodes, allowing horizontal scaling of performance and capacity by adding nodes, and ensuring reliability through data redundancy. It can deliver exabyte‑scale capacity and is suitable for massive data scenarios such as virtualization/cloud computing, high‑performance computing, big‑data analytics, and large‑scale backup/archive.

China Distributed Storage Market Size

According to research by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Distributed Storage Industry Alliance, the market reached 178 billion CNY in 2021, growing 44% year‑over‑year, outpacing the 25% growth of enterprise external storage. Forecasts project the market to exceed 205 billion CNY in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 15% for the next three years. Integrated hardware‑software solutions account for 91.3% of the market, driven by demand from large‑scale AI models and data‑lake workloads.

Market Structure (2022)

In 2022 the Chinese distributed storage market was divided as follows:

Distributed file storage: 46.5 billion CNY (44.63%)

Distributed block storage: 33.1 billion CNY (31.77%)

Distributed object storage: 24.6 billion CNY (23.61%)

File storage is gaining prominence due to its broad application compatibility, block storage is valued for stability, while object storage remains cost‑lier and requires further optimization.

Industry Adoption Scale

Analysis of 2020‑2021 data shows that the top five adopting industries are government, telecommunications, finance, education, and manufacturing, together accounting for 73% of total market share. Sectors with rapid digital transformation such as telecom, finance, manufacturing, and transportation continue to drive high growth.

Key Application Scenarios

The industry identifies nine major scenarios for distributed storage. Traditional use cases include virtualization/cloud computing, electronic ticket imaging, and medical imaging non‑linear editing. Accelerated digital transformation fuels growth in high‑performance computing (HPC) and big‑data analytics, where 2021 growth rates reached 130% and 105% respectively, with expectations of sustained rapid expansion over the next three years.

Related Technical References

For deeper technical insight, see articles on NVMe performance factors, RDMA, NVMe‑oF, and low‑latency storage system design (links omitted for brevity).