The uncertainty surrounding the enterprise disk marketplace seems to be causing EMC to mention that it has a disk shortage and there will be a price increase. Dave Raffo in his blog has the following interesting information:
EMC vice chairman Bill Teuber sent an email to customers and partners stating the vendor has eaten price increases so far, but will begin to pass them along to customers after this month. He also wrote that EMC does not expect supply problems because it is the largest vendor of external storage systems, but it has to pay more for the available drives.
“EMC has absorbed the price increases that have been passed on to us and will continue to do so through the end of the month,” Teuber wrote. “Unfortunately we will not be able to sustain that practice. Beginning in Q1 2012 we will be increasing the list price of hard disk drives up to 15% for an indefinite period of time. While we hope that this increase is temporary, at this time we cannot forecast how long the flooding in Thailand will impact HDD [hard disk drive] pricing.”
Another email Teuber sent to EMC personnel said the price increases will be from 5% to 15%. He also wrote the increases will apply to all EMC product lines.
The shortage is expected to affect PC drives more than enterprise drives, but EMC enterprise storage rival NetApp lowered its revenue projection last month because of expected shortages.
Teuber referred to NetApp indirectly in his email, stating “Many of our competitors have already announced drive shortages and price increases and have stated that this will have a material impact on their ability to hit revenue expectations now and in the future.”
Zerowait has been experiencing an uptick in our array shelf and disk storage sales over the last few weeks, but we thought it had to do with the great prices we are now offering on some of our storage specials. But the upward trend in our storage sales business could be because we have a lot of stock which we can ship immediately, while the OEM’s may be allocating disks based on their own supply calculations.
We had a great year in 2011, and we are looking forward to next year.
