Consistent double digit growth expected for storage networking
Consistent double digit growth expected for storage networking
The storage networking market is set to grow by 10 percent year on year for the next four to five years, a research group has predicted.
According to the new Yankee Group report, as component prices drop, ease of deployment and maintenance will prove critical success factors.
But the report also warns that challenges remain for storage networking vendors, primarily the need to make Fibre Channel SANs affordable and easy to deploy and maintain, in the face of an increasingly viable iSCSI option.
Increased competition is another factor, as this will continue to drive down the price per port in the Fibre Channel SAN component market, increasing customer deployments but cutting into overall revenue.
“We expect the storage networking market to grow appreciably in the next several years before it levels off sometime in 2007 or 2008,” said Yankee Group senior analyst Stephanie Balaouras. “Key to this growth is the ability to penetrate into the untapped small and medium enterprise markets. This will require prices for Fibre Channel SAN components to continue to drop and vendors of these components as well as storage and storage management vendors to work together to reduce the complexity of Fibre Channel deployment and management.
“Continued growth into the large enterprise market depends on continued innovation in director features and functionality including multiprotocol support for iSCSI and FCIP to network lower cost servers into the SAN and to connect SAN islands for better manageability. Larger enterprises will begin to look for heterogeneous switch vendor support,” concluded Balaouras.
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