Enterprises are spending more money on larger disk storage systems, according to a recent report.

IDC's quarterly study on external disk storage systems found that the market for disk storage systems continues to grow, turning over $4.3bn in factory revenue.

Enterprises are spending more on higher-capacity systems, according to the report, which cited systems costing between $50,000 and $300,000 as selling particularly well.

IDC reported the total amount of storage shipped at 783 petabytes, a 50.2 per cent increase over the third quarter of last year.

The research firm credits this rise in demand to increased virtualisation, the consolidation of offices, and a rise in demand for the storage of fixed content such as archived videos and email messages.

EMC appears to be deriving the most benefit from the increased demand, recording a 21.4 per cent share of the total quarterly revenue for external storage systems and 21.7 per cent for network storage systems, making EMC the market-share leader in both areas.

HP maintained an overall lead in the total disk storage system market, claiming 22.7 per cent of the total market and $1.4bn in revenues for the third quarter of 2006.

IBM was second with 20.2 per cent, and EMC was third with 15 per cent, up from 13.7 per cent a year ago.

IDC also predicted that iSCSI would become increasingly popular as a means for linking networks, mainly because the system is easy and inexpensive.

The firm recorded a 100.8 per cent revenue increase for iSCSI, which uses IP to link machines in storage networks. IDC said that iSCSI will only gain in popularity as vendors start to offer more products featuring the technology in the coming months.