Asia Pacific a leader in external storage
Asia Pacific a leader in external storage
Australia is the third largest user of external storage in the Asia Pacific region and a new report from Gartner Dataquest estimates that the market is worth $549 million.
Gartner believes businesses in the Asia Pacific region are focussing on external storage because they are focusing on how to use their storage resources. The report found that Australian businesses are embracing storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS). Australia's adoption of networked storage is considered to be akin to that of South Korea, according to the report.
"This is indicative of Australian organisations wanting to improve storage efficiency through the use of storage networking," the report says.
South Korea ranked as the number one user of external storage, with China piping Australia to second place.
"While China today has not attained the No. 1 status when it comes to external storage, compared to the server market, we do expect China to eventually account for a larger slice of the storage pie than South Korea," said Matthew Boon, the principal analyst for the computing platforms group at Gartner Dataquest. The report also indicates that businesses in the area will continue to move towards networked storage. Networked storage accounted for 48.5 per cent of total external storage revenue in the first six months of 2002; direct attached storage (DAS) accounted for the remaining 51.5 per cent.
Interestingly New Zealand had the largest adoption of storage networking relative to its total external storage consumption.
Market leader for the region was Hewlett-Packard (HP) and its merger partner Compaq. Together they commanded 22 per cent of the revenue and 21 per cent of the market share. "While HP emerged as the overall leading external storage vendor in the first half of 2002, this was largely due to revenue derived from the external DAS market," said Phil Sargeant, the research director of Gartner's servers and storage division. Breaking down the figures, Mr Sargeant said that EMC was the leading SAN provider and Network Appliance the leader in the NAS market for the first half of 2002.
Gartner explains that the explosion in email and large digital files such as digital imaging and audio information as the drivers behind the need for networked external storage.
"The demand from emerging data heavy content technologies is being felt not just in the mature markets of the region, but from emerging markets such as China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia," Mr Boon said.
The full report is available from Gartner.
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