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Worldwide Enterprise Storage Semiconductor Market to Pass the $1 Billion Mark in 2005, IDC Predicts

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

The enterprise storage semiconductor market will pass the $1 billion mark in 2005, an 18.5% jump from 2004 when the market will rise to $857 million. Steady growth in the longer term will allow this segment to reach $1.2 billion in 2008, representing an 11% CAGR for 2003-2008, reveals a new IDC study.

"The market for semiconductors within enterprise storage equipment continues to evolve as the demands for networked storage grows," said Sean Lavey, program manager for Semiconductor Research at IDC. "New storage technologies such as serial ATA (SATA) and serial attached SCSI (SAS) coupled with the emerging IP-based iSCSI protocol will have a major impact on driving further adoption of networked storage into the SMB masses. Meanwhile, Fibre Channel (FC), which has been used heavily in large enterprise and datacenter environments, is also shifting its focus towards attracting higher volume shipments within smaller-sized businesses due to lower costs."

Among key trends discussed in this study are the following:

-- Competition from chip vendor is growing as networking and datacom chip players have made acquisitions and are allocating larger amounts of R&D spending to become bigger players in the enterprise storage market.

-- Adoption of serial SATA and SAS continues as SATA finds a fit in low-end enterprise storage segments, while SAS is poised to eat away at the larger SCSI installed base.

-- Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) continue to migrate to programmable logic devices (PLDs) and some merchant application specific semiconductor products (ASSPs). Higher up-front NRE charges for cell-based ASICs will likely encourage more OEMs to look to migrate their designs away from custom silicon.

-- FC HBAs and switches will migrate to 4Gbps in 2005. Backward compatibility along with similar pricing to 1/2 Gbps will allow faster 4 Gbps to become the next migration in FC.

IDC's new study, Worldwide Enterprise Storage Semiconductor Market 2004-2008 Forecast and Analysis (IDC #31895), examines all application-specific semiconductor standard products (ASSPs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs) and processors shipping into direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area networking (SAN) markets. This includes RAID adaptors and RAID-on-motherboard (ROM) controllers, FC HBAs, FC switching infrastructure, and external storage systems (a.k.a. disk arrays). A top-line forecast for the semiconductor components used within these storage system markets is provided, segmented by key application markets for 2003-2008. This year's study includes more detailed coverage on the FC SAN disk array segment.

To purchase this document, call IDC's sales hotline at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com.

For additional information about IDC's Semiconductor research, please contact Anne-Sophie Dankens at adankens@idc.com.

About IDC

IDC is the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information technology and telecommunications industries. We analyze and predict technology trends so that our clients can make strategic, fact-based decisions on IT purchases and business strategy. Over 700 IDC analysts in 50 countries provide local expertise and insights on technology markets. Business executives and IT managers have relied for 40 years on our advice to make decisions that contribute to the success of their organizations.

IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Additional information can be found at www.idc.com.

All product and company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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