Worldwide revenue from data storage systems rose 10.3 percent in the first quarter to $4.2 billion, with the largest and most-expensive systems showing the fastest growth, market researcher IDC reported.

 EMC kept its top ranking in IDC’s quarterly disk storage systems tracker released late Thursday, claiming 21.8 percent of the market, up from 21.4 percent a year earlier. Hewlett-Packard kept the No. 2 spot with 17.9 percent market share, unchanged from a year ago.

IBM’s market share rose to 12 percent from 11.6 percent, keeping it in third place. IBM was followed by Dell with 8.2 percent market share, up from 7.8 percent. In fifth place was Hitachi Data Systems, the data storage business of Japan’s Hitachi Ltd., with 8.1 percent of the market.

Growth was driven by high-end systems costing at least $500,000, as large corporations sought to consolidate data storage in fewer, higher-capacity systems rather than adding smaller machines to existing data centers, said Brad Nisbet, program manager of IDC Storage Systems.

In recent past quarters, growth stemmed from midpriced systems costing $25,000 to $500,000 as customers tried to reduce costs.

“It’s not that the high end has taken over, by any means,” Nisbet said. “But we do see a resurgence. The midrange systems are growing very well, too.”

Revenue from high-end systems rose nearly 40 percent from a year earlier, while midrange systems advanced about 15 percent, IDC said.

EMC’s Symmetrix DMX series of high-capacity storage machines was responsible for a large share of the growth in high-priced systems, Nisbet said.

EMC also sells storage machines to Dell, which resells them as EMC-Dell co-branded systems. Such systems grew 26 percent from a year earlier and accounted for 78 percent of Dell’s overall data storage revenue in the first quarter, Nisbet said.