Research firm IDC says the top five external storage systems suppliers were Dell, NetApp, Everpure, Huawei and HPE in that order in the first 2026 quarter.
The numbers come from its 1Q26 Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems (ESS) Tracker, and the findings point to a sharp acceleration in the first quarter of 2026 for enterprise storage systems, reaching $9.2 billion in vendor revenue, a 22.7 percent year-over-year increase. This was driven by AI Infrastructure demand, deferred refresh spending, and component price inflation for NAND and DRAM.
Juan Seminara, research director, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers, IDC, said: “The first quarter of 2026 marks a turning point for the enterprise storage market. After two years of being eclipsed by server and AI compute spending, storage is returning to double-digit growth performance.”
He thinks that: “The convergence of a long-deferred refresh cycle, rising component prices, and AI-driven storage demand, from training to inferencing and unstructured data activation, is producing a growth environment we have not seen in this market for several years. The structural shift toward All Flash Arrays crossing the 50 percent revenue threshold reflects a clear transition in how enterprises architect their data infrastructure for the AI era ahead.”
The top 5 external enterprise storage system supplier companies worldwide in the first 2026 quarter were:
Dell saw success across its broad portfolio and its AI storage attach strategy. NetApp’s second place was underpinned by its growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management. Everpure moved into third position helped by subscription model adoption and AI-optimized platforms.
IDC pointed out that the full-year 2025 external ESS market reached $33.0 billion (+3.9 percent YoY). The sharp 1Q26 acceleration signals a fundamental shift in market trajectory as AI infrastructure storage demand becomes a primary growth engine.
It says the enterprise storage market spent much of the prior two years in the shadow of explosive server and GPU investment. It’s now benefiting from two reinforcing tailwinds: enterprises refreshing storage infrastructure that was deferred while AI server spending took priority, and a new wave of AI-driven storage demand emerging from training pipelines, inferencing workloads, and unstructured data activation use cases.
IDC noted storage is increasingly framed as a critical bottleneck in enterprise AI deployment, a view supported by vendor earnings disclosures and IDC channel data from 1Q26. Multiple leading storage vendors reported record or near-record revenue in recent quarters, with demand tied directly to AI workload requirements. All-flash platforms targeting GPU-to-storage bandwidth requirements in AI training and inferencing environments are among the fastest-growing product categories tracked by IDC.
Component pricing was a revenue driver, with SSD, HDD, and DRAM prices all rising on a quarter-over-quarter basis, pushing system-level average selling prices upward. IDC expects this pricing pressure to persist through 2027, before new fabrication capacity brings meaningful supply relief.
Other findings:
All Flash Arrays (AFA) crossed the 50% revenue threshold for the first time, generating $4.9 billion (+32.7% YoY) and representing 52.6% of total ESS revenue.
Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA) grew 14.0% YoY to $3.5 billion (37.8% share), while All HDD arrays grew 10.2% to $0.9 billion (9.6% share).
High End systems (systems priced above $250K ASP) surged 60.7% YoY to $2.4 billion, now representing 25.5% of the market, driven by large-scale AI infrastructure storage deployments and deferred refreshes..
Midrange systems ($25K–$250K) grew 17.3% to $5.9 billion (64.4% share), Entry systems (<$25K) declined 6.1% to $0.9 billion.
Geographically the US market was dominant, growing (+30.4% Y/Y to $3.95 billion with a 42.8% share). The top three fastest-growing regions were:
Central & Eastern Europe (+41.7%),
Canada (+25.4%),
PRC (+20.7%),