Worldwide storage semiconductor market looking chipper
Worldwide storage semiconductor market looking chipper
The enterprise storage semiconductor market will pass the US$1 billion mark in 2005, an 18.5 percent jump from 2004 when the market will rise to US$857 million.
Growth will remain steady in the longer term, allowing this segment to reach $1.2 billion in 2008, representing an 11 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2003-2008, reveals a new IDC study.
"The market for semiconductors within enterprise storage equipment continues to evolve as the demands for networked storage grows," said Sean Lavey, program manager for Semiconductor Research at IDC. "New storage technologies such as serial ATA (SATA) and serial attached SCSI (SAS) coupled with the emerging IP-based iSCSI protocol will have a major impact on driving further adoption of networked storage into the SMB masses. Meanwhile, Fibre Channel (FC), which has been used heavily in large enterprise and datacentre environments, is also shifting its focus towards attracting higher volume shipments within smaller-sized businesses due to lower costs."
The study also found that competition from chip vendor is growing as networking and datacom chip players have made acquisitions and are allocating larger amounts of R&D spending to become bigger players in the enterprise storage market.
Adoption of serial SATA and SAS continues as SATA finds a fit in low-end enterprise storage segments, while SAS is poised to eat away at the larger SCSI installed base, while application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) continue to migrate to programmable logic devices (PLDs) and some merchant application specific semiconductor products (ASSPs). Higher up-front NRE charges for cell-based ASICs will likely encourage more OEMs to look to migrate their designs away from custom silicon.
Additionally, FC HBAs and switches will migrate to 4Gbps in 2005. Backward compatibility along with similar pricing to 1/2 Gbps will allow faster 4 Gbps to become the next migration in FC.
The study examines all application-specific semiconductor standard products (ASSPs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs) and processors shipping into direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area networking (SAN) markets. This includes RAID adaptors and RAID-on-motherboard (ROM) controllers, FC HBAs, FC switching infrastructure, and external storage systems.
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