14 DAY TRIAL // Access to the Internet and the arrival of new high-definition content increase the users' demand for larger capacity of storage media. A recent report issued by the International Data Group (IDC) research company says that the capacity of disk storage devices that have sold across the world in the third quarter of this year grew by nearly 50 percent as compared to last year.
At the same time, the total capacity of all the storage devices sold in this interval came to 1.3 exabytes (1 exabyte equals a million of terabytes). The figures include external and internal arrays, NAS (network-attached storage) and Open SAN (storage area network) devices, but a disk storage system is composed of at least three disks.
Storage business has maintained profit and, according to IDC, revenue for the sales grew 4.3 percent from a year earlier to $6.3 billion, with EMC as the sales leader for external disk storage systems as well as for the NAS and open SAN markets.
The Network Attached Storage solutions are quickly becoming a trend within small and medium businesses and the bestsellers in the area are low-end-systems that are tagged under $15,000. The enterprise sector is aiming at more complex and expensive storage solutions to meet their needs, which made the mid-level and high-end storage solutions ell well too.
The most significant leap in sales was the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) sector that managed to grow in sales almost 44 percent to $207 million. This branch of storage solution is dominated by the US Network Appliance company that took the lion's share: 20.5 percent of the total revenue, while the other player, EMC, only snatched 18 percent. EMC however managed to compensate their revenues in the networked disk storage market (including NAS and Open SAN), where they managed to account for 27.8 percent of the market, in a tight competition with HP and IBM.