The gradual evolution of storage continues

If a week is a long time in politics, then five years is even longer in the information technology industry. While the Australian storage industry hasn’t seen the advent of any major disruptive new technologies since 2003, there has been a gradual evolution, a maturation of various technologies over that time that has altered the Australian storage landscape in a major way.

Non-technological factors have also had an impact on the storage landscape. Prices continue to come down while capacity requirements continue to go up, driven by factors such as data intensive applications and electronic retention policies. Indeed, one of the major changes over the past five years has been a changing attitude towards storage, and the legal implications of getting it wrong.

As a result, storage has now become a C-level topic of discussion which in turn is beginning to drive behavior in the Australian market. Key to this has been the introduction of legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II that has required companies to change their approach to storage and data management.

“This in turn has reflected in more holistic data management strategies where information lifecycle management solutions are now being considered in the market, as opposed to point data storage solutions of the past,” said IDC’s program director - Asia Pacific storage research, Simon Piff. “The need to manage, maintain, secure and access data at the right level at the right time has impacted the Australian market recently.”

The Australian disk storage systems market has been influenced by several factors over the past five years, including a continuing decline in storage hardware prices. Disk storage prices continually fell over that time driven partly by competitive pressure and technology advances such as increasing capacity per drive and cheaper, high-capacity SATA and SAS disks for high-performance SCSI and Fibre Channel Disks.

“Increased take-up rates of lower-cost entry-level and midrange disk storage systems by SMEs have also affected average price points,” said Piff. “The net result of all this is that price per gigabyte has fallen rapidly, for example it fell by 21% from 2006 to 2007, decreasing to only US$5.57.”