Market Saturation and you.

You know, early on in the storage boom we were led to believe by almost everyone - journalists, pundits, analysts, even investment bankers, that the boom times for high-end storage were coming because of the ever-increasing data needs of the average business.But those boom times never really materialised. I'm sure that there are people at several high-end storage companies already firing up email to write me, that's fine, read the rest first, it gets worse.

Those boom times aren't coming.

Not for the high-end anyway, they were already here, now they're just a memory. While you were looking forward to the "boom times" you missed the high-water mark, when the majority of companies looking for high-end SANs were putting them in.

Interestingly, the same is not true for affordable storage systems. There are a lot of vendors in the mid-tier market, be they SAN, NAS, iSCSI, appliance or software, but there's gold in them thar hills.

You see, just because a company had hundreds of gigabytes more data this year than last didn't mean that they had hundreds of thousands more dollars in the budget this year than last, hence the low-to-mid enterprise market did not embrace SANs, and won't likely do so in the future. Instead they bought NAS's or iSCSI, or increased the storage in their servers (yep, good old DAS lives in some organizations).

So now on the high end of storage we're going to see some interesting gyrations in the next year or two. Mergers, more "SMB" offerings, diversification, you name it. Because on the high-end they're fighting for the marginal edge of customers, those willing to move vendors and those who only want/need a smaller SAN, but want one of the "big three" of Storage.

It should be interesting to watch. Nearly as interesting as watching who comes out on top at the SMB/SME end. My guess is that it won't just be "the same old companies" we're used to in storage.What should you, as a consumer of storage products do? What you always have. Mid-tier storage solutions are not generally high-maintenance. You put them in and they "just work" 99.9 percent of the time. So even if your vendor gets merged, do you care? I wouldn't.