The sales of external controller-based (ECB) data storage devices garnered more than $19.4 billion last year, says research company Gartner. This represents an 18.1 percent increase over the $16.5 billion of 2009, and is the sector's highest revenue-producing year ever--even exceeding the record sales figure from 2008. EMC retained its leadership position, and IBM remained in second place. Following closely in third place is NetApp, who jumped three places forward with year-to-year revenue growth of an astonishing 50.9 percent.

Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner observed that IT executives are showing a willingness to invest in new and modern ECB offerings. Cox observed, "Storage infrastructure modernization, expanded server and desktop virtualization projects, disk-based backup and archiving deployments, new file-oriented applications, and cloud-based service offerings are the engines that are propelling ECB disk storage vendor revenue growth."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CIO Insight
- check out this article at PC World
- check out this article at CBR

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