Storage: A year in review

The year began with bullish forecasts from research house Frost & Sullivan. Its analysts predicted the European market for Storage Area Networks (SANs) would grow from $1.92bn last year to $64.11bn in 2006.

February was apparently good news for companies with extended storage requirements - especially the growing number of dot-coms. Hewlett-Packard (HP) launched a pay-as-you-go storage scheme based on its SureStore E Disk Array XP256 product which let companies install the unit with as much storage space as needed. No more having to buy large amounts of capacity and leave it unused, the company claimed.

March's highlights included Intel's announcement of Network Attached Storage (NAS) offerings for small businesses. Developed by the chip giant's networking business, the InBusiness Storage Station appliance came with hard drives of 30GB or 60GB, and was aimed at small businesses.

April saw another leading theme of the storage year, as silicon.com's guests argued over differing - and often incompatible - SAN strategies. Veritas reported first quarter revenues up 82 per cent, but speakers we interviewed at the company's annual user conference claimed vendor self-interest and competing industry bodies were hindering the adoption of SANs. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Fibre Channel Association and the FibreAlliance were all involved in the search for common ground.

May did not bring good news for European companies who, according to Callum Lavelle, VP of software specialist Highground, were wasting billions of pounds a year on unnecessary storage. Research by Highground showed that up to 45 per cent of data stored by businesses was duplicated, unused or spent on non mission-critical data like personal files.

IDC backed up Frost and Sullivan's bullish outlook on the storage market in June, releasing a report which predicted the worldwide storage system market will experience an 80 per cent increase in unit shipments to 2003. It added that sales of storage components will grow dramatically in the next two years - largely due to the rising demand for data storage for dot-com companies and the emergence of SANs.

July was good news for the open source community - IBM publicly increased its commitment towards open source software, announcing a $200m, four-year investment to ramp up its Linux initiatives in Europe. The funding was ploughed into development centres in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and the UK to focus on the development of storage systems, middleware and Linux-ready servers.

The open source storage saga continued in August when Sun extended its Linux support with a fault-tolerant Linux failover option for its high end, enterprise StorEdge T3 storage array developed in partnership with Linuxcare. The announcement built on the company's promise in June at the launch of the T3 (then named 'Purple') to provide support for Linux.

New storage products grabbed the headlines in September - Dell unveiled its latest storage hardware products prompted by rapid growth of the internet and demand for increased storage area from the dot-com sector. The company has added to its range a network attached storage server, PowerVault 705N, and PowerVault 530F.

In October, big was the word, as far as the disk drive goes - US storage specialist Maxtor bought Quantum's Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Group in a deal valued at $2.3bn. Maxtor itself claimed the all stock deal will create the world's leading disk drive company, shipping more than 50 million disk drives annually for PC, Intel-based servers and consumer electronics applications.

Size continued to matter in November when Storage giant EMC swallowed an US company Crosstor for $300m in stock. The privately owned company from Massachusetts develops firmware for manufacturers of NAS products - storage systems on a network, which, like a server, can be directly addressed.

And the final year end note came from the removable storage market - IDC said that the popularity of recordable CD-ROMs is set to drive a boom in the removable market to $5.8bn in the next four years. The analysts said that rewritable CDs will become the primary floppy replacement technology for the desktop.