Information continues to grow 60- 80 percent around the world based on industry you are in. In 2005, the industry shipped 380 million disk drives totaling a massive 35 million terabytes (35 Exabyte) of storage - an increase of 60 percent from 2004. This underscores the enormous proliferation of digital content and the need for mass storage in the growing number of consumer electronics devices as well as across the computing landscape. As more content providers unlock digital content for users, data storage requirements increase and at the same time storage management becomes more difficult and important.

We see more customers moving towards disk based backup and recovery solutions, they will implement more disk-to-disk-to-tape solutions. With so many natural disasters, definitely there will be increase in disaster recovery/business continuity solutions implementations. As corporate governance and compliance issues increase in different industries and countries, they will require more e-mail archiving and records management solution. As the cost effectiveness of Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) increases, we will see lot more adoption to these technologies in coming years.

There will be lot of focus on data security whether data is at rest or data is in motion. Midrange arrays will become more popular as they become more intelligent. Organizations will set up tiers of storage to make the most cost-effective use of their storage resources in a move towards Information Life Cycle Management. We will see more storage services and consulting opportunities coming, as end users want to focus on their core business. There will be lot of focus on branch-office solutions, as organizations can’t afford to have expensive resources at each location for storage management.

Some other trends and technologies we will see in 2006: Demand for networked storage capacity will continue in 2006 and drive the need for more trained storage IT professionals, increased use of automated storage management tools based on standards, adoption of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) practices and an increasingly critical need to comply with government regulations.Storage standards will continue to take-hold in the industry and play a vital role to drive industry processes for greater interoperability. Securing the storage infrastructure and data protection will become integral to corporate-wide IT security strategies and practices.

The Internet will continue to be an incubator of innovative ways to store, mine, and create data to drive increased information value and new information services for both the commercial and consumer sectors worldwide. The Small Medium Business segment will continue to be a growth segment for networked storage. Utility computing and grid computing architectures will increasingly reference Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) standards for storage and data management.