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China's Storage Market Develops a Green Focus with End-users Placing Greater Emphasis on Storage Systems Efficiency, says IDC

Source: IDC中国  Date: 2008-04-02

Beijing, 2 April, 2008--According to IDC’s China Quarterly Storage Tracker (4Q2007), China's disk storage market grew by 24.2% year-on-year in 2007. The revenue totaled USD1141.8 million, including USD871.8 million in external disk storage, with a year-on-year growth rate of 27.5% and a capacity of 149.3PB disk capacity. IDC predicts the CAGR for external disk storage will be 14.7% from 2008-2012.

Reco Li, Senior Analyst of IDC's China Computing Systems Research, says, "The key market drivers are the consolidation of telecom carriers, upgrading of data centers by the various state banks, implementation of critical public sector functions, increased demands from oil companies and potential investments from SMBs. The biggest challenge faced by vendors is that more end-users are now focusing on storage systems efficiency in order to comply with power restriction policies.”

IDC predicts power restriction will largely affect Northern and Eastern China. Local governments initiated the power reduction policies by limiting usage on a year-on-year reduction basis for all enterprises, particularly for large enterprises that consume more power. Driven by different green criteria in various vertical industries, the requirements for cost effective storage systems will also vary.

For fast growing enterprises, total cost of ownership, power consumption, and effectiveness of storage systems are top priorities for CIOs. They are concerned about the low performance of their data centers which might lead to wastage. Instead of increasing storage systems and expanding data centers, they are focused on increasing the effectiveness of storage systems through virtualization. Storage virtualization enables a data center to fulfill the business function and helps to reduce overall power consumption.

IDC expects the two important technologies that will help meet the demand of business are data de-duplication and disaster recovery. There are several other related technologies, such as Snapshot and RAID (Redundent Array of Independent Disk), which are important to overall storage functionality and solution. Information Life-cycle Management (ILM) is vital in making the data center more efficient and productive by increasing the tiered storage infrastructure with higher capability so that different storage products are able to capture varying levels of business information. Virtual Tape Library (VTL) and Tape are core in providing proper data protection. Other technologies, such as Flash, iSCSI and new diskette with high density and large capacity, will also affect the market in the next 3-5 years.

IDC believes the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is the biggest challenge for local storage suppliers. Due to the need for stable systems during the Games, it is expected that the IT infrastructure of the telecom, finance and government sectors will need to be changed or upgraded. As a result, some of these projects have been or will be brought forward into the first half of 2008.

"Green" remains the main focus of the storage market. Majority of the hardware suppliers are advocating power efficiency and data center transformation. At the same time, storage standards will have to comply with government policies and standards. As a result, industry regulations and local government long-term strategies on environmental protection are expected to create more demand for "green" equipment.

For more information about IDC, please visit www.idc.com.cn. To purchase this report, please contact IDC China Sales Department at +86-10-83913610 or send email to fwang@idc.com.