(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com June 12.)

Hyper-Scale Data Center Firms On The Rise

The global storage market appears to be shifting away from traditional enterprise storage vendors to the hyper-scale data center companies, according to first-quarter results from IDC's 2017 Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker.

The Framingham, Mass.-based analyst firm said total worldwide enterprise storage revenue in the first quarter was $9.2 billion, down slightly from the first quarter of 2016 despite a massive 41.4 percent increase in capacity shipped over the past year.

Three of the top five storage vendors – Dell EMC, HPE, and Hitachi – saw significant drops in their storage revenue in the first quarter compared to last year, while NetApp saw a huge jump and IBM grew a bit, according to IDC.

But the biggest change was a nearly 80 percent jump in the amount of storage that went to what IBM calls ODM direct, which primarily includes hyper-scale data center companies including the top public cloud vendors and cloud-based application providers, showing a solid shift in the way businesses and consumers consume storage capacity.

For a look at what happened during the first quarter of 2017, keep reading.