HP, Dell and IBM continue to languish in the storage market when compared to the big guns such as EMC and NetApp.

In a post on StorageNewsletter.com, Jean-Jacques Maleval writes that EMC, NetApp and Hitachi continue to grow fastest in the storage market. What’s striking to Maleval is the fact that these leaders have not seen the challenge from the server vendors.

HP, Dell and IBM all have server offerings yet are showing a real lag in overall storage revenues.

Does this make sense? It would seem that especially in the coming age of convergence that the  major players of the server world could bundle a server and storage package that competes better with the standalone storage offerings from EMC, Hitachi and NetApp.

But Maleval says that is not the case:

On its side, HP, number one server vendor in units shipped, IBM number one in revenues, Dell number two in shipments, all of them record poor storage results for their last financial quarter:

• storage hardware down 4% Y/Y for IBM
• total storage revenues decreased 8% Y/Y for Dell
• storage products up only 1% Y/Y for HP.

HP, in particular, is having a difficult time. According to Maleval, HP’s storage revenues totaled $1.95 billion for the six months ended April 2012, down 2% compared to the same time last year.

That’s down 2% from the same period one year ago: “At the same time, sales for its entire enterprise servers, storage and networking are also decreasing, 8%, at $10,229 million with an 11.2% operating margin.”

HP Discover starts next week and I expect we will hear about the new frontiers of storage and its fit with HP Cloud, big data and virtualized networking.

But I will have another question.

How will HP close the gap with EMC and NetApp while fending off IBM and Dell?