Storage, Peripheral or Keystone?

What are the major Drivers of the storage industry and what Trends will be seen? Who are the major players and how do their strategies differ? What are some of the simple technology brick walls that we are approaching?

Storage continues to be a major growth component of IT infrastructure. It appears that price competition has dramatically impacted storage vendors revenue and market value, as is reflected in their stock prices. However, if anything, petabytes shipped will exceed early forecasts. MIS Management continues to display heightened awareness and commitment to business continuance and enterprise data integrity. This has helped the industry sustain a high level of storage capacity shipments. The movement to networked storage will gain momentum over the next few years. The combination of increased focus and experience with networked storage has led IDC to predict the percentage of disk revenue generated by networked storage sales in Canada to grow from 34 per cent in 2001 to 72 per cent in 2006.  

Storage is moving from being something that came with every server and held data to the central core of the enterprise. You can lose a server but you can't lose the data!

It is imperative that an organization understand the importance of corporate data.