At a time when Dell’s domestic sales are falling in part due to the poor economy and the fact that many enterprise customers are not spending on IT, Dell is focusing on its worldwide sales to make up the difference. Dell has been doing well in worldwide sales for its PCs over the year and it announced recently that it has become number one worldwide in open systems storage.

Dell says that in Q1 2008 it captured 20.4% of the open systems external worldwide disk array storage market. Dell also says that its revenue in this market was $422 million. The closest competitor to Dell’s market dominance had an 18.5% share of the market and $385 million in revenue.

Dell says this is important to its business because data is expanding faster than computer systems. Dell says that in Q1 2008 it shipped 116 petabytes of external disk storage. "That is an astounding amount of storage capacity," said Thomas. As a comparison, it is estimated by some that the total printed matter contained by all U.S. academic research libraries equals only two petabytes. All told, Dell ships more than an estimated 288 petabytes of total disk storage each week within all of its products - including servers, desktops, laptops and enterprise storage systems - in order to accommodate the demand for storage in the digital universe.

Via Dell