|
If you really want to stay abreast of storage growth and trends, I'd suggest reading the storage industry magazines, such as Storage magazine, InfoStor, etc., as well as the analyst websites such as IDC and Gartner. If you subscribe to the various newsletters and mailing lists, you'll have a collection of reports in short order -- I almost need a SAN to keep track of all of the white papers, case studies, reports, etc.
There are focused storage analyst firms such as ESG, and financial analysts such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., etc. who publish storage focused newsletters, which always give a good overview of the industry trends, as well as the financials that are tied to it. Another suggestion is to check out the storage trade shows (or even the show archives on the respective websites), where you might find surveys and analysis reports.
The analysts usually charge for much of their work, some of it is in the free give-away sections, others can be found by looking at vendors who paid for certain kinds of research. So if you visit the EMC, HDS, Veritas, NetApps and other storage vendors sites you can often find many of these reports.
Bottom line: If you read enough of them, and if you don't mind the daunting signal to noise ratio, you can get a pretty good picture of what the real story is in the industry to support your information needs.
Why do you need this information? Are you trying to justify a budget, or are you looking for market research for business purposes (i.e. are you in storage technology sales or planning on starting a business)? Let me know, I'll try and give you some suggestions or point you to a few places that have nifty resources.
Regards,
Joel Lovell
|
