Network Storage on the Rise

By Greg McNevin

May 27, 2008: According to the analysts at ABI Research, network storage will be the fastest growing core home networking category over the next five years, with the sector expected to hit just over US$1.4 (AU$1.46) billion by 2013.

The firm calculates that network storage is worth in the vicinity of US$400 (AU$416) million worldwide today, however, as sales of home networking equipment such as routers slow and the hunger for storage space grows exponentially, network storage is expected to ramp up rapidly.

“ABI Research believes that network storage will see more consumer pull-based demand in coming years, though we never expect consumer network storage to see the same type of overall market demand as we’ve seen in the home router and gateway market,” says research director Michael Wolf. “That being said, we think overall adoption of consumer network storage will grow significantly from the 10% of home network owners today who use network attached storage.”

ABI sees the market experiencing a 26 percent annual growth for the next five years, however, this is likely to be affected somewhat by the increasingly popularity of USB hard drives and growing amount of “cloud” storage available on the Internet.

“More and more consumers will see a need for both backup and central storage of digital files,” says Wolf. “While cloud-based storage services offer a good way for consumers to access content remotely, there is no beating the speed of local network storage. We think ultimately consumers will choose a mix of both online and locally based network storage.”

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