The industry shifts from snorage to storage

At the end of 2007 the Australian storage market was worth just a shade under half a billion dollars ($499.2 million to be exact) and had just recorded 20 percent growth, according to IDC’s program director for Asia Pacific Storage Research, Simon Piff. At its most basic, the Australian storage landscape consists of vendors, distributors and resellers, and systems integrators, but that is to underestimate its complexity.

The Australian IT market, and storage is no exception, is highly complex and competitive, with every major vendor - as well as several not so major vendors - represented. The other major component of the Australian storage landscape is the battle between fibre channel (FC) and iSCSI protocols. Some vendors have their feet in both camps, while others extol the virtues of their preferred technology. But what are the real differences between FC and iSCSI?

EMC product marketing manager, Clive Gold, divides the storage landscape into four different models. “There are vendors like EMC who have committed to Australia, with established research and development teams, global support organisations, and sales and marketing, as opposed to vendors who are testing the waters by putting sales into the country. There are also products that are represented by a sole distributor, usually a system integrator who has found some niche technology and products that go through a two tier distribution channel, such as Westcon or IngramMicro, who have a great number of resellers that purchase through them.”

HP StorageWorks division product marketing manager, Mark Nielsen, believes there is an even more fundamental difference between vendors in the storage market. “In the storage market, there are vendors providing end-to-end solutions, offering not only storage but servers and other forms of infrastructure, and there are vendors that are focused mainly on storage.”