Market headwinds stall growth for HDD vendors

NEW YORK, USA: The data storage industry is benefitting from the rapidly growing data volumes, however, a few factors appear to be inhibiting significant growth, finds the latest The Bedford Report.

Market uncertainty and wavering investor confidence has adversely affected almost every aspect of the technology sector.

Hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers are on the upswing as disk prices doubled in the past two weeks following the severe flooding in Thailand and could potentially rise by the same amount again, channel sources have warned.

John Rydning, research vice president for hard disk drives at technology consultant IDC, estimated that factories in Thailand currently affected by flooding account for some 25 per cent of worldwide HDD production.

Cloud storage is a model of storage where data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties. Driven by the growth of cloud computing, cloud storage is rapidly growing from a small percentage of the IT market to a significant opportunity.

According to AMI Partners' report, US SMB Playbook, the surge of cloud computing is growing rapidly, with the market for hosted storage set to increase 11 per cent yearly until 2015. Cloud computing is highly appealing to today's organizations, not only because of its projected cost savings but also because of the cloud's flexibility.