History 2002: Remote Storage Market to Top $19 Billion in 2005

Storage and management of the billions of gigabytes of computer data generated each year is driving rapid growth in distributed SANs, and this is good news for optical telecoms carriers according to a new report, SANs: New Revenues for Optical Carners? ($975) from Analysys, advisor on telecoms and new media.

Analysys forecasts that global revenues from SAN traffic and storage service provision carned over a WAN will reach $19.3 billion in 2005, up from $500 million in 2000.

Storage and management are now major issues for businesses of all sizes, according to the Analysys study. Organizations need an array of storage facilities and services, including DR, Web hosting, content warehousing, digital data exchanges, datamarts, disk mirroring, storage sharing, centralized backup and archiving.

SANs, which are rapidly emerging as the technology of choice in this area are not being extended from user sites over the WAN by using dark fibre: ATM, GbE and IP.

This, says Analysys, will lead to the creation of huge networked virtual storage and data management systems.

“By using their high-capacity IP optical networks, telecom carriers, particularly those operating in the metropolitan and wide area networks can potentially generate significant new traffic and service revenues for themselves,” says report author, Tim Hills.

However, while the opportunities for carriers in this new market are considerable, careful assessment is essential. Success will depend on having the right combination of characteristics for the carrier’s chosen segment of the multi-layered storage market.

Moving storage networking to an IP base will help eliminate the need for separate storage and data networks, improve management and flexibility, and allow the offering of third-party managed storage services across the WAN.

“Such services are not only attractive to major corporations, they also have the potential to reach SMEs, which often lack the expertise to maintain their own storage solutions,” adds Hills. “Needless to say, affordable IP broadband access will be crucial to opening the SME market for WAN SANs.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 168 on January 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.