Neither buying lower-end systems nor temporarily using iSCSI should cause enterprises any great management headaches, especially if they stay with one vendor, Conner said. Certain pairs of vendors also have good compatibility between their systems, though others don't, she said.

The dramatic slowing in the storage market didn't shake up the rankings of the major vendors, IDC said. In the external disk storage market, EMC remained the top seller with market share of 20.7 percent. Hewlett-Packard and IBM were in a statistical tie for second place with 11.5 percent and 11.3 percent, respectively. Dell and Hitachi were tied for fourth place.

EMC also continued to lead the network disk storage market, made up of NAS and Open SAN. It had 26 percent of market revenue, followed by NetApp with 12 percent, IDC said.

IDC's report counts revenue by the brand of the product and doesn't count OEM (original equipment manufacturer) revenue to vendors whose products are sold under a different brand.

IDC is a division of International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.