Dude! Dell Still Soaring in Storage

Once again, a lot of storage dudes got Dells last quarter.

Dell Computer Corp.s (Nasdaq: DELL) external storage was one of the fastest-growing segments of its overall business in the third quarter. Compared to Dell's total year-over-year revenue growth of 16 percent, storage revenues increased by a whopping 68 percent in the quarter and have nearly tripled over the past two years (see Dell Storage Sales Up 68%).

Dell sells co-branded versions of EMC Corp.'s (NYSE: EMC) midmarket Clariion and high-end Symmetrix disk arrays, and has benefited from that arrangement -- as well as from its server sales and Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) entry into the NAS market.

“Both Symmetrix and Clariion have been receiving very good acceptance in the marketplace, but the bulk of the sales fall into the Clariion product line,” Dell CFO Jim Schneider said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “And that’s the area that we are going to continue to focus on.”

Storage remains a tiny piece of Dell’s business, but it did take market share from major players on that front. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) are Dell’s main competitors in the disk array market. Dell also picked up substantial market share in the second quarter, according to market research firm IDC (see IDC: Dell, IBM Lap Up Share).