..........The fastest growing storage companies in 2004..........

Chewing over 2004 - the Rising Stars of Storage and the Dogs which Failed to Bark

In 2004 - STORAGEsearch estimates worldwide storage market revenue exceeded $70 billion. That's bigger than the worldwide server market - which was about $45 billion but smaller than the PC market which was $250 billion.

If anyone was skeptical about the recovery in the IT market which started in the 3rd quarter of 2003 - the results were clear for everyone to see by the phenomenal growth in the storage market in 2004.

18 of the world's top 1,000 storage companies achieved annual revenue growth rates above 30%. While 3 exceeded 100%.

The fastest growing major segments within the storage market were:-

• solid state disks - 50%
• flash memory - 45%
• DRAM - 25%
• Storage Software - 19%
• NAS - 14%

The Storage Dogs Which Didn't Bark

Some new storage interconnect technologies like iSCSI and Infiniband failed to achieve the market traction which had been optimistically predicted by the venture capitalists which funded their original development. Although growth rates for both these markets were in double digits - the number of user sites remained disappointingly small. Technical compatibility problems were cited as the cause for low iSCSI take up, and STORAGEsearch will be returning to this issue with a market survey in Q1 2005.

The InfiniBand market suffered user neglect for two main reasons. The biggest server companies were hanging on as long as possible to their more profitable proprietary interconnects, and the recession had stymied the threat from potential startup server makers. Another reason was that conventional technologies such as Ethernet and Fibre-channel were getting faster - and in the minds of many users - might make the need for InfiniBand irrelevant.

Compared to the double digit growth in the star segments above, markets which merely achieved single digit revenue growth such as hard disk drives, fibre-channel HBAs and switches and tape backup systems looked like they were flatlining.

In 2004 there was a 75% reduction in the rate of storage companies being acquired, merged or going bust. Only 21 of the top 1,000 storage companies met this fate compared to an average annual 86 companies in the period 2000 to 2003.

Looking ahead to 2005 STORAGEsearch predicts that the solid state disk market will maintain its momentum and grow past $2 billion annual market revenue. Serial Attached SCSI will become the hottest DAS connection technology and will quickly replace parallel SCSI in new high performance systems by the 2nd half of the year. In the storage networking market - 4Gbps Fibre-channel will become the new standard at the high end, while the debate in the Ethernet attached NAS market over the merits of TCP/IP hardware accelerators will be ended by the market accepting that it's a must-have and not just a nice-to-have option.

Stay tuned to our news page to see how this continuing saga unfolds. Or take a look at our storage history pages and the article Chewing over 2003 to see how 2004 compares to the past.

See also:- Silver Blaze - the online short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose Sherlock Holmes first uttered the memorable phrase about "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."