Core Insights - The article highlights the growth of storage revenue in Q3 2025, primarily driven by sales of mid-range all-flash arrays, with Pure Storage showing the fastest revenue growth among the top five vendors [2]. Market Overview - The global External OEM Enterprise Storage Systems (ESS) market grew by only 2.1% year-over-year, reaching approximately $8 billion, with the top five vendors holding a combined market share of 56.5% [2]. - Dell leads the market with a 22.7% share, generating $1.812 billion in revenue, but experienced a 49% decline year-over-year [2]. - Huawei ranks second with a 12% market share and $953 million in revenue, marking a 9.5% increase, outperforming the market average [2]. - NetApp, in third place, reported a revenue of $750.16 million, growing by 2.8% due to its all-flash array sales [2]. - Pure Storage achieved a revenue of $539.22 million, reflecting a significant growth of 15.5% year-over-year [2]. - HPE saw a revenue decline of 7.5%, totaling $450.23 million [2]. Product Segment Performance - The overall storage market growth rate from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 was 2.1% [2]. - All-flash arrays experienced a robust growth rate of 17.6%, while hybrid flash disk arrays and disk drive arrays saw declines of 9.8% and 6.3%, respectively [3][4]. Geographic Performance - The U.S. market faced a decline attributed to weak OEM performance, with a notable drop of 9.9% [7]. - Other regions showed varying growth rates, with Japan at 14.4%, Canada at 12.6%, and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at 10.5% [7]. Future Outlook - IDC anticipates that the demand for specialized and efficient enterprise storage systems will increase due to the penetration of AI applications in enterprise data centers [5]. - The need for flash storage is expected to grow continuously to support AI-related projects, including training and inference [5].

Group 1: Nutanix - Oppenheimer initiates coverage on Nutanix with an "Outperform" rating and a target price of $90, citing benefits from the industry's shift towards hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) [1] - Nutanix is positioned to gain market share as VMware faces customer resistance due to price increases, allowing Nutanix to capitalize on this opportunity [1] - The company has strong capabilities to build and deliver AI applications, leveraging the growing demand for unstructured data, which supports its business expansion in the AI era [1] Group 2: Pure Storage - Oppenheimer initiates coverage on Pure Storage with an "Outperform" rating and a target price of $120, highlighting the company's advantage in the all-flash array (AFA) market [2] - The growth in demand for unstructured data storage driven by AI applications is expected to benefit Pure Storage, allowing it to capture market share from traditional HDD and other flash vendors [2] - The expansion of its customer base to include tier-one and tier-two hyperscale data centers is anticipated to drive strong new customer growth and improve operating margins [2] Group 3: Rubrik - Oppenheimer assigns a "Market Perform" rating to Rubrik, indicating that its valuation reasonably reflects its growth prospects [3] - The increasing importance of data is expected to expand the total addressable market (TAM) for backup storage, benefiting Rubrik [3] - The rise in data security vulnerabilities and ransomware attacks aligns with Rubrik's security-first strategy, although competition in the network resilience space is intensifying [3]