IDC statistics on SAN markets
"There was a vague cloud that people called a SAN," says Gerry Fostaty, marketing manager at Brampton, Ont.-based Open Storage Solutions. "The hardware seemed to be ready, but there was no way to connect everything up in the middle. Things have changed."
And how. IDC predicts that by 2003 SANs will push annual worldwide sales of storage arrays to US$10 billion, SAN switches to US$1.6 billion and SAN hubs to US$800 million. Pretty good figures for a technology that is just now poised for takeoff, although Dan McLean, research manager of network support and integration at IDC Canada, cautions that Canada is typically behind the networking trends. Still, Phil Soran, president and CEO of XIOTech Corp., believes those numbers are light -- by a factor of 10. The SAN man will sprinkle his magic dust all over your customers' sites. "What the LAN did to your business in the late '80s and '90s, the SAN will do over the next five years."
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