Intersect360 HPC Storage Market Report: Key Findings and Trends

Intersect360 released a storage market report as part of its HPC user series, surveying roughly 60 storage vendors and covering installation, storage systems, networking, middleware, and support software at high‑performance computing (HPC) sites.

The main results show that storage capacity continues to rise: across 391 sites the total capacity reached 2.4 EB, a 24% increase over 2015. Installations of PB‑scale or larger systems are growing, now representing 37% of all reported storage systems, with 2 PB, 1 PB and 100 TB being the most common capacities.

Vendor share highlights DDN leading with 14.8%, followed by Dell EMC at 12.7% and IBM at 11%; all other vendors each hold less than 10% of the market.

Approximately 4.7% of the reported storage systems are cloud‑based (public and private), with Amazon Web Services remaining the primary cloud storage provider for the HPC community and the fifth most‑mentioned commercial vendor.

Year‑over‑year installation share shows Dell EMC and HPE growing faster than other vendors, while IBM’s share is declining. Despite IBM’s historical advantage, its overall ranking is slipping, and DDN shows early signs of reduced installations.

Across academic, commercial, and government sectors, the top storage vendors capture 60%–75% of installations; Amazon Web Services is a leading commercial storage provider, while finance and biosciences also hold significant shares.

Regionally, DDN dominates North America and EMEA, HPE leads in APAC, and IBM’s market position is weakening across all regions.

In terms of capacity, DDN, IBM and Dell EMC hold the top three spots for installations above 500 PB, while traditional vendors such as HPE and NetApp mainly serve below 10 PB.

Key observations include: the top five vendors have deployments across all capacity ranges; DDN accounts for 79% of installations ≥500 TB; Dell EMC maintains a stable 12%–14% share across capacities; about 55% of IBM systems are very large; HPE lacks very large (≥1 PB) and very small (<10 TB) installations; over half of small systems (<100 TB) are from the top five vendors.

HPC storage market revenue was $4.87 B in 2015 (17% of total HPC revenue) and is projected to reach $6.57 B by 2020, driven by growing data volumes and advances in HDD/SSD capacities.

In 2016, 37% of storage systems were ≥1 PB, up from 9.6% in 2010; for systems upgraded in 2015, 51% exceeded 1 PB. If this trend continues, more than half of installed storage will be ≥1 PB by 2020.

The report concludes with a ranked list of all mentioned vendors; DDN, Dell EMC and IBM occupy the top three positions, with Amazon also in the top ten due to cloud storage. Chinese vendors Infortrend and Lenovo rank among the top two domestically.

While the statistics may not be exhaustive, they provide a useful snapshot of the HPC storage landscape, highlighting both opportunities and challenges for the industry worldwide.

For a full version of the report, readers are invited to contact the author via the public account.