Report: Big Biz Driving SAN Market

Forget SMBs. Large businesses are the main buyers of storage networking, according to a recent report from Macarthur Stroud International.

"I totally disagree with the tenet that it's small to medium-sized businesses that are driving the SAN market," says Hamish Macarthur, CEO and founder of the U.K. marketing and research consultancy. Instead, he says, companies with over 500 employees are the ones that account for increased SAN adoption.

While Macarthur says this applies worldwide, his specific research in this report is focused on Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). There, what Macarthur calls distributed SANs, or implementations of storage networking involving more than one SAN segment, rose by 10 percent in 2004 to encompass 57 percent of companies surveyed.

Figure 1:

Penetration of organizations employing over 500

Most SAN installations tallied by his firm feature 16 to 24 ports, Macarthur says.In terms of revenue, the firm estimates the EMEA market for SAN gear will grow from 16.4 billion in 2004 to €24.0 billion in 2007 -- an average annual compound rate of 13.5 percent. Germany is leading EMEA in SAN adoption, with the U.K. and France following closely, in that order.

NAS gear is also growing, Macarthur says, and the use of NAS devices has doubled in 2004 over last year.

Worldwide, the biggest driver for storage networking is data. Among SAN users, the firm says data capacity increased by over 100 percent in 2004. Regulatory compliance and the need to store more information for reference have helped fuel the growth, though Macarthur says Europe hasn't seen the same "kneejerk reaction" to compliance for its own sake that there's been stateside.

Macarthur sees software as a fast-growing product area, increasing by 28 percent in terms of revenue in 2004. This segment includes everything from backup applications to management tools, particularly those that improve the performance of systems as a whole. Users are starting to look to software for more benefits from the devices they're buying, he says.

In this contest, information lifecycle management (ILM) is a term that not only has meaning but money behind it. "Twenty percent of users have got an ILM strategy, and another 20 percent are looking to implement one," Macarthur says.— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

Need to know more about next-generation communications technology in enterprise data centers? Come to Light Reading's Data Center Forum 2004 specialist one-day conference in New York City on December 8.

Click here