Aberdeen looks at storage "realities"

Aberdeen looks at storage "realities"
By Alan Earls

A new report from Aberdeen Group, the Boston-based analyst firm, paints a picture of the storage field that ought to sober up vendors and provide food for thought for everyone else. The report -- "Enterprise Storage 2001: From back-office afterthought to strategic buying decision" -- chronicles the storage industry's important trends and the changing landscape of the enterprise storage market.

The report outlines criteria for evaluating enterprise products and services based on principles such as availability, manageability, scalability, robustness, flexibility, breadth, and integration. According to Zachary Shess, storage analyst at the company who co-authored the report with Aberdeen analysts David Hill and Dan Tanner, "If I were going to generalize, the market is at precipice where you have many legacy systems -- the direct-attached storage [DAS] we have always known -- along with a rapid evolution of newer technologies."

"DAS is still working fine for many people -- but then you have SANs maturing to the point where many people are deploying them, and you have emerging IP storage virtualizations," Shess continues.

"These new technologies won't be on a five-year adoption curve like Fibre Channel -- the market will change much more in the next five years than it has in the last five," he adds.

The 114-page report also profiles a large number of key

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storage suppliers including: Brocade Communication Systems; Compaq Computer Corporation; Computer Associates International; Dell Computer Corporation; EMC Corporation; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi Data Systems; IBM; Legato Systems; Network Appliance; StorageNetworks Inc; Storage Technology Corporation; Sun Microsystems; and Veritas Software.

More information on the report is available at http://www.aberdeen.com/.

About the author: Alan Earls is a freelance writer in Franklin, MA.

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This was first published in March 2001

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