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In 2004 -
StorageSearch.com 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.
17 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:-
The 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 - 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 to see how 2004 compares to the past.
A Happy New Year to You
All! |
