WW Disk Storage for Digital Media Market Earned Revenues of $24 Billion in 2007

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, World Disk Storage for Digital Media Market, finds that the market earned revenues of nearly $24.0 billion in 2007 and estimates this to nearly double by 2014.

     
Advances in digital media have caused companies within the enterprise, media and entertainment, as well as telecommunication sectors to increasingly adopt digital formats for broadcasting, archiving, post-production of videos, animation, images, audio, and unstructured data. These large files need specialized, cost-effective, sophisticated, and high-capacity storage products to help with their preservation as well as fast access and retrieval.

This spurt in digital information and increased bandwidth is driving the demand for disk storage, especially since it offers enhanced storage efficiency, lower operational costs, and makes the content easily accessible to consumers globally.

Some important end-user segments include the growing user base of telco, broadband, and mobile services, as they accelerate the demand for better storage systems.

"To optimize this opportunity, vendors of digital media storage systems are persistently working toward offering disk-based storage solutions that are more reliable, secure, scalable, and have high throughput rates," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Meghali Sharma. "Not only will these disks provide better archiving facilities but they will also recover and restore digital assets much faster than tape-based storage solutions."

Although digital technology is being adopted across verticals, the conventional tape technology has continued to hold firm against the competition from disk-based storage with intelligent software capabilities. Restricted IT budgets and a lack of awareness regarding the ways in which storage products could be used to earn greater ROI on digital assets have slowed down the pace of growth of the disk storage market.

"Tape has been the traditional form of storage for archival and backup and its usage cannot be eliminated completely, as companies still continue to maintain at least one final copy on that medium," notes Sharma. "Moreover, tape-based storage solutions are cheaper than disk storage, as they consume less electricity and require minimal cooling, considerably reducing the total operational costs."

In fact, media and entertainment companies continue to maintain huge video tape-based libraries and few have complete digital workflow processes in place.

This scenario is set to change once more industries make the shift to digital media usage. The emergence of new digital formats necessitates greater storage capacity, intelligent storage management platforms, and enhanced performance, giving a thrust to disk-based storage systems.

"Storage vendors have also come up with storage solutions that are coupled with software that provide superior security, help in content management, and extend flexibility to their customers in handling the ever-increasing pool of digital data," observes Sharma. "Additionally, digital media storage vendors have introduced green initiatives that aim to reduce operational costs and thus, motivate companies to invest in the more reliable and faster disk storage."