Disk storage market grows, value crawls

NEW DELHI: IDC Research has estimated the Disk storage market in India at 1709.6 Terabytes in 2001. This attributes to a growth of 64.2 percent over corresponding figures in 2000. In terms of value, the market grew by a mere 4.2 percent to total at $141.25 million. External storage continued to register impressive gains and totaled at 997.2 Terabytes for 71.9 percent growth over corresponding figures in 2000. The drop in value is an indication of the growing maturity of the market as prices are stabilizing and are on par with the rest of the countries in the region.

Proposed as a solution for large and mid sized companies with escalating data storage requirements, storage area network (SAN) has been the focus of development and attention. Furthermore, Network Attached Storage (NAS) product launches by most of the Indian storage players indicate much action within this space. The growth of SAN and NAS has created an additional new dynamic. IDC research in India indicates a marked increase in the growth of non-captive and external storage.

The factors promoting the growth of the market in India include the decreasing cost per megabyte, the low installed base of these solutions and the transition in the amount and type of data that is to be stored and managed. More commendable has been the attitude, wherein storage is quickly moving from being a largely tactical "add-on" technology to be widely recognized as a strategic issue by itself. Terabytes of storage sold into an NT based environment continued to grow in the Indian market and accounted for nearly 56 percent of total sales. Reasons for the increase in numbers include the cost advantage associated with NT and increasing number of servers sold in the entry-level space where Windows NT has a much larger presence.

Vendor analysis shows that Compaq and HP continued to lead the market with 43.5 percent and 19.4 percent of the overall terabytes sold in 2001. Both vendors held on to their respective positions in the fast growing, external storage market with 41.4 percent and 18.9 percent, respectively. Their share in the internal storage market totaled at 43.0 percent and 23.1 percent. Imperative to its improved performance has been installations in the banking, finance and the telecommunication segment. Other vendors in the top five include IBM, Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems.