Sun makes storage market gains

Sun Microsystems has moved ahead of international competitors like Hitachi Data Systems and Fujitsu with its new Open Storage systems, according to IDC's Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. The report said Sun moved into fifth place on the world chart with $494 million in sales, or 7 percent of the market. Sun recorded a 29.2 percent year-over-year increase in factory revenue for the second quarter, far outperforming the overall market, eWeek.com reported.

The report also noted that the Sun strategy is to keep increasing the number of its open-source oriented OpenSolaris/Zettabyte File System storage offerings to help fuel enterprise interest. Hewlett Packard remained the revenue leader with $1.25 billion in quarterly sales and control of 20.3 percent of the market. IBM was second with a 19.1 percent market share for $1.23 billion.

"Despite concerns about a 2008 slowdown in IT spending, external disk storage systems spending experienced strong growth in the first half of 2008," Natalya Yezhkova, a research manager for Storage Systems at IDC said in a statement.

For more on storage:
- see this eWeek.com article