Originally posted by: TonyPearson
I got the following comment on my earlier post [
A Recap of Storage Industry Acquisitions], Reuben wrote:
According to Gartner data (from 2005!), host-based storage accounts for 34 percent of the overall market for external storage, with the remaining 66 percent going to "fabric-attached" (network) storage, expect this share to grow from 66 percent to 77 percent by 2007.What is the current reality? SAN vs. NAS, FC vs iSCSI?
IBM subscribes to a lot of data from different analysts, they all have their methods for collecting this data, from taking surveys of customers to reviewing financial results of each vendor. While theymight not agree entirely, there are some common threads that lead one to believe they represent "reality". Hereare some numbers from an IDC December 2007 report:
| Worldwide Disk Storage | 2007 Petabytes | Percentage | 2006-2011 CAGR |
| Internal (host-based) | 1701 | 32 | 50 |
| External | 3640 | 68 | 60 |
While the 32/68 split is similar to the 34/66 split you mentioned before, you can see that external growth isgrowing faster, so internal host-based storage will drop to 25 percent by 2011, with external storage growing to 75 percent, very close to the 77 predicted. Looking at just the externaldisk storage, there are basically three kinds: DAS (direct cable attachment), NAS (file level protocols suchas NFS, CIFS, HTTP and FTP), and SAN (block-level protocols like FC, iSCSI, ESCON and FICON):
| Worldwide External Disk Storage | 2007 Petabytes | Percentage | 2006-2011 CAGR |
| Direct-attach (DAS) | 738 | 20 | 33 |
| NAS (NFS/CIFS/etc) | 815 | 22 | 65 |
| SAN-FC/iSCSI/ESCON/FICON | 2087 | 57 | 66 |
At these rates, fabric-attached (SAN and NAS) will continue to dominate the storage landscape.Looking more closely now at the block-oriented protocols.
| Worldwide External Disk Storage | 2007 Petabytes | Percentage | 2006-2011 CAGR |
| Fibre Channel (FC) | 1733 | 83 | 48 |
| iSCSI | 262 | 13 | 137 |
| ESCON/FICON | 92 | 4 | 28 |
At these rates, iSCSI will overtake FC by 2011. IBM System Storage N series, DS3300 and XIV Nextraall support iSCSI attachment.
Jon Toigo over at DrunkenData offers some additional data from ex-STKer:[Fred Moore Outlook on Storage 2008]. I met Fredat a conference. He had left STK back in 1998, and started his own company called Horison. NeitherJon nor Fred cite the sources of his statistics, but the following comment leads me to assume hehasn't been paying attention closely to the tape market:
With the demise of STK, who will be the leader in the tape industry?
Depending on how old you are, you might remember exactly where you were when a significant eventoccurred, for example the[
Space Shuttle Challenger]explosion. For many IBMers, it was the day our friends at Sun Microsystems announced they were [
puttingour lead tape competitor out of its misery]. I was in New York that day, but there was still someconfetti on the floor in the halls of the IBM Tucson lab when I got home a few days later. IBM hasbeen the number one market share leader in tape for over the past four years.
technorati tags: Gartner, IDC, host-based, fabric-attached, NAS, iSCSI, SAN, FC, ESCON, FICON, NFS, CIFS, internal, external, disk, systems, storage, DrunkenData, Fred Moore, STK, Sun, confetti, Challenger