Rich Content Drives Asia-Pacific Storage

Increased use of e-mail, streaming video and audio and digital imaging drove the external storage market to $549 million in Asia-Pacific during the first half of 2002, Gartner Dataquest research shows.

“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.” analyst Matthew Boon said in report a released today.

South Korea ranked first in external storage revenue in the region, with China closing in. The research firm from believes China will eventually account for a larger slice of the storage pie in region.

Elsewhere, Australian firms have embraced storage networking (SAN and NAS) to a much greater degree than
organizations in China, making Australia the third largest user of external storage in Asia/Pacific. The largest
adoption of storage networking, relative to its total external storage consumption, is New Zealand.

As for vendors, newly merged Compaq and Hewlett-Packard is the overall leader in external storage revenue with 22 percent market share. EMC is a close second at 20 percent, with IBM in third place with 14 percent of market share.

In customer surveys, Gartner Dataquest sees organizations in Asia/Pacific looking to
networked storage. 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.