New Report Forecasts No Significant Upturn in Storage Revenue

Overall 2002 storage revenues will not see any significant upturn, according to a report published by Peripheral Concepts, Inc.

In calendar year 2002, a number of companies will show lower revenues than 2001 just because their first half of 2001 was still very strong. But, says the report, storage networking is suffering less than the rest of the industry. SAN and NAS systems, software and components are expected to grow about 20%, while the overall storage system revenue will only reach in 2002 its 2000 level of $24 Billion.

According to the report, the economy slump has not hindered designers ability to innovate. The past eighteen months have seen a surge in the number of well-funded start-ups; over one hundred of which are identified in the report.

“New technological advances are about to completely change the landscape of storage networking. No vendor can ignore this movement, as some of the technologies that seemed promising last year may end up being stop-gap short term solutions,” says Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts, Inc. and author of the report.

The most significant advances are happening in three areas that may overlap. First is a family of new hybrid devices that combine the functions of a server, a multi-protocol low latency switch, and a virtualization engine. They are called intelligent/routing switches, appliances, or global controller. They may end up to be the best vehicle to fulfilling the convergence of SAN and NAS. The second area of major changes is in data acceleration techniques, involving parallel processing combined with grand scale silicon implementations. Thirdly, come virtualization and aggregation engines which are overcoming some of the most serious shortcomings of NAS and SAN.

For more information on the report – “SAN and NAS — Infrastructure, Products and Market Opportunities” – visit the Peripheral Concepts Website.