In 2011, six vendors dominated disk storage with more than 80% of the market share.  Here are some of the highlights from the last year according to Network Computing’s Steve Wexler (“Disk-y Business“).

• According to Gartner, users are still buying the best-of-breed products from NetApp and EMC, and not from the server vendors like IBM and HP.
• EMC grew its external disk revenue share from 3% in 2010 to 28%  in 2911.  EMC also made its biggest product launch in its history with 41 new products.
• One of the big stories in 2011 was Dell’s ongoing move away from being a storage reseller (EMC) to being a storage innovator, largely through acquisitions (such as EqualLogic, Compellent, Ocarina and Exanet). Dell also actively pursued long-term profitability by expanding its own portfolio of storage solutions, which generated a 15% revenue increase in 2011.
• Both Cisco and Brocade trended downwards in purchases for 2011. Symantec and Commvault also faced challenges, and HP was another vendor that “raised concerns”.
• HP announced an entry-level SMB storage appliance in June, which supports the VMWare API for Array Integration, as well as the vCenter manager for server virtualization.  HP also announced a number of new products, including the HP EVA P6000 storage appliance, the HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, the V400 and V800, which were optimized to run in IT-as-a-service environments.