APac external storage market touched $549 mn in first 6 months of 2002: Gartner Dataquest

Organizations across APac are focusing more heavily on their storage resources, as was evident in the first half of 2002 when

the Asia/Pacific external storage market totaled $549 million, according to Dataquest Inc, a

unit of Gartner Inc.

"E-mail, video, digital imaging and audio information are contributing to a massive explosion in storage capacity," says

Matthew Boon, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest's APac Computing Platforms group. "The demand from

emerging data-heavy content technologies is being felt not just in the mature markets of the region, but from emerging markets, such as China,

India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia." 

South Korea ranked No 1 in external storage revenue in APac, recording higher external storage revenue than China, despite

China being No 1 in terms of server revenue.

Singapore and India registered fairly similar levels of overall regional market share. Gartner's Boon adds, "Interestingly whether classed as

mature markets such as Australia and Singapore or immature such as India, there continues to be a direct correlation between server revenues and

storage revenues in many markets of APacific".

"While China today has not attained the No 1 status when it comes to external storage, compared to the server market, we do

expect China to eventually account for a larger slice of the storage pie in APacific than

South Korea," says Boon. 

The newly merged Compaq and Hewlett-Packard emerged as the overall market leader in external storage revenue with 22 percent market share and 21

percent market share in terms of actual external storage capacity. "While HP emerged as the overall leading external storage vendor in the

first half of 2002, this was largely due to revenue derived from the External Direct Attached Storage (DAS) market," says Phil Sargeant, research

director for Gartner's Servers and Storage research in Asia/Pacific. "When we break down the segments, EMC was the leader in the SAN segment, while

Network Appliance was the No. 1 vendor in the NAS segment for the first half of 2002."

In recent customer surveys, Gartner Dataquest continues to see organizations in APac looking to networked storage to

improve their overall storage infrastructure capabilities. During the first six months of 2002, networked

storage (Storage Area networks and Network Attached Storage) accounted for a combined 48.5 percent of total external storage revenue, with the

remaining 51.5 percent attributable to externally attached DAS storage.

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