As the Q2 earnings season comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of this quarter’s best and worst performers in the data storage industry, including Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) and its peers.

Data is the lifeblood of the internet and software in general, and the amount of data created is accelerating. As a result, the importance of storing the data in scalable and efficient formats continues to rise, especially as its diversity and associated use cases expand from analyzing simple, structured datasets to high-scale processing of unstructured data such as images, audio, and video.

The 5 data storage stocks we track reported a satisfactory Q2. As a group, revenues beat analysts’ consensus estimates by 2.5% while next quarter’s revenue guidance was 1.3% above.

Stocks, especially growth stocks with cash flows further into the future, had a good end of 2023. On the other hand, this year has seen more volatile stock market swings due to mixed inflation data. Thankfully, data storage stocks have been resilient with share prices up 6.8% on average since the latest earnings results.

Weakest Q2: Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW)

Founded in 2013 by three French engineers who spent decades working for Oracle, Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) provides a data warehouse-as-a-service in the cloud that allows companies to store large amounts of data and analyze it in real time.

Snowflake reported revenues of $868.8 million, up 28.9% year on year. This print exceeded analysts’ expectations by 2.1%. Despite the top-line beat, it was still a slower quarter for the company with a miss of analysts’ billings estimates.

"Snowflake delivered another strong quarter, surpassing the high end of our Q2 product revenue guidance and, as a result, we're raising our product revenue guidance for the year," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake.

Snowflake scored the fastest revenue growth of the whole group. The company added 25 enterprise customers paying more than $1m annually to reach a total of 510. Even though it had a great quarter relative to its peers, the market seems discontent with the results. The stock is down 20.2% since reporting and currently trades at $148.26.

Is now the time to buy Snowflake? Access our full analysis of the earnings results here, it’s free.

Best Q2: Commvault Systems (NASDAQ:CVLT)

Originally formed in 1988 as part of Bell Labs, Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT) provides enterprise software used for data backup and recovery, cloud and infrastructure management, retention, and compliance.

Commvault Systems reported revenues of $224.7 million, up 13.4% year on year, outperforming analysts’ expectations by 4.2%. The business had a very strong quarter with an impressive beat of analysts’ billings estimates and a solid beat of analysts’ ARR (annual recurring revenue) estimates.