Regional focus for Network Appliance

NETWORK Appliance Inc has identified the Asia-Pacific as the region which presents tremendous growth opportunities for its unified storage solutions business.

Its vice president for Asia-Pacific Thomas Chin said the prospects look good as there are many developing markets in the region such as Malaysia and Singapore.

According to him, Network Appliance is also well-positioned in the region’s telecommunications sector, where it commands 90 per cent share of the market.

Based on the promising outlook, the company is confident of growing its Asia-Pacific revenue contribution to 20 per cent by 2005, compared to the present 15 per cent, Chin told Computimes in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.

He added that Network Appliances is also bullish about its Internet SCSI solutions, because iSCSI is expected to become the mainstream broadly deployed technology for network storage products in the near future.

According to Chin, iSCSI simplifies the storage of massive amounts of data by enabling the construction of cost-effective storage area network (SAN) solutions in departmental, regional or remote data centres where fibre channel solutions are not a cost- effective option.

“iSCSI enables IT organisations to leverage their investment and expertise in Ethernet networking infrastructure to deploy either departmental SANs that complement their existing fibre channel data centre SAN or green field SANs within their distributed information and communications technology (ICT) environment,” he said.

Among Network Appliance customers here are Mimos, Telekom Malaysia, TM Net and Petronas.