By Sophie Lindqvist

The worldwide external OEM enterprise storage systems market grew 33.6 percent year over year to $10.34 billion in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC's quarterly enterprise storage tracker. That is the second-largest quarter in the tracker's history, behind only the final quarter of 2024.

Read the headline number with care. IDC revised the first quarter's growth rate twice. The tracker originally posted 22.7 percent annual growth in June, as a Dell blog noted at the time. IDC now puts that quarter at 28.7 percent. A vendor that restates its own recent figures by six percentage points invites caution about the current print.

What is driving the growth?

IDC attributes the revenue rise to three forces, and only one reflects real unit demand:

• Rising memory, NAND and disk component prices, which lift system prices directly;
• Enterprises catching up on deferred storage refreshes;
• Purchases pulled forward to secure supply and pre-empt future price increases.

Pull-forward buying flatters current quarters at the expense of later ones. IDC's own framing concedes this. The market release does not say how much of the 33.6 percent came from price versus shipments, and that gap matters for anyone forecasting 2027.

How did each segment perform?

All-flash arrays took the majority of revenue. Hybrid systems grew solidly. Nearline-heavy HDD arrays grew least.

• All Flash Arrays: $5.4 billion, up 42.9 percent, 52.1 percent share;
• Hybrid Flash Arrays: $3.9 billion, up 25.5 percent, 37.5 percent share;
• All HDD arrays: $1.1 billion, up 22.6 percent, 10.4 percent share.

The price-band split is more revealing. High-end systems, priced above $250,000 average selling price, surged 90.6 percent to $2.7 billion, a 26.2 percent share. IDC attributes this to large-scale AI infrastructure storage deployments. Midrange systems ($25,000 to $250,000) grew 28.2 percent to $6.7 billion and hold 64.8 percent of the market. Entry systems, below $25,000, fell 14.6 percent to $0.9 billion.

Entry-level decline is the number worth watching. It suggests smaller buyers are deferring purchases or shifting down-market spending elsewhere. AI budgets are crowding out routine storage refreshes at the low end.

Where do the vendors stand?

Dell leads the market and grew revenue 42.5 percent, second-fastest among the top five. Everpure grew fastest, at 50 percent, according to the tracker. NetApp grew 35.7 percent, third-fastest. HPE at 31.9 percent and Huawei at 29.4 percent both grew below the market rate and lost share.

Vendor ranking history adds context, but IDC's inconsistent public publishing, with missing quarters, makes precise quarter-over-quarter comparisons difficult. Dell shows a seasonal high in the first quarter, with Huawei typically second. NetApp and Everpure have repeatedly swapped positions; NetApp currently leads. Huawei and NetApp have also exchanged second and third places in the past.

HPE's Alletra sales are increasing steadily quarter over quarter, which sets up genuine volatility ahead. The next edition of this tracker could show changes in each of the second, third, fourth and fifth positions.

What should buyers take from this?

Component price inflation, not just demand, is lifting revenue across every segment. IDC does not break out unit growth, so the 33.6 percent figure overstates physical market expansion by an unknown margin. Buyers who pulled purchases forward have borrowed from future quarters.

The competitive picture remains fluid. Dell's lead looks stable, but the chase pack does not. If NAND and disk prices ease, as pull-forward demand unwinds, expect the tracker's growth rates to compress sharply in 2027.