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first
published on our NAS page
December
2006
As the market for networked consumer storage in
2011 will be bigger than that for NAS in the enterprise, consumer storage
companies and products (with much lower price points and cost of sales) will
take over what is now regarded as the low and medium levels of the market which
are (in 2006) occupied by Network
Appliance, HP and
EMC.
The
consumerization of network storage may be a more aggressive and dramatic process
than the consumerization of the PC was for the computer industry in the 1980s
and 90s.
If international markets remain open then most, if not all, the
world's leading NAS manufacturers by 2011 will be based in China, Taiwan or
Korea. The lowest cost place to manufacture NAS will be in proximity to, or in
the same factory as, the lowest cost place to manufacture the drives. The
ground breaking investments for those super storage plants of the future have
already begun.
Standardization will mean there will be much less
opportunity for US NAS manufacturers to supply services or higher pricing based
on brand strength. Although new markets will be created for very high
performance storage systems to deliver the backbone functionality that will be
required by the demands of the online digital tv market - it is possible that
those needs will be met by server farms of single board computers with onboard
embedded solid state disks,
and that for most organizations the notion of the "big storage box"
may be as irrelevant as the concept of the mainframe is today - for large
internet companies like Google.
NAS market shifts may lead to a scramble to acquire high end
storage switch and
router storage technology - which will become the central cores in enterprise
storage environments.
One safe bolthole for the NAS industry will be
long term archive storage. Because it's unlikely that the media used for online
enterprise storage (which will overlap with consumer products) will comply with
the needs of data regulators.
See also:-
Squeak! - How
Solid is Hard Disk's Future? | |
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