Strategic Visions

Research group charts the future of networks, storage, and world-class datacenters

Strategic Research Corp. has released "The Future of the Business Network, " a report articulating trends in networking, server, I/O, and storage technology supporting business datacenters. According to the report, the datacenter infrastructure industry is set to grow from $211 billion in 2001 to more than $350 billion by 2005. Storage systems and networking will be the top datacenter revenue category by 2003.

Growth will occur in key infrastructure segments, including hardware (increasing from $127 billion in revenue in 2001 to $210 billion in 2005), network software ($21 billion in 2001 to $35 billion in 2005), and services ($63 billion in 2001 to $105 billion in 2005).

The report said that chaotic, disjointed datacenter infrastructures will converge into a global Internet-based service capable of running across many e-business datacenters, connecting interoperable devices, and providing high-availability service. Such "utility-scale" networks are needed to support the massive bandwidth that B2B and BI applications will demand, according to Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research and author of the report.

The key to turning that vision into reality, Peterson said, is to define an industry standard for Quality of Service that "will convey a message that information services are always available, high quality, openly accessible, and trustworthy." The infrastructure industry must also cooperate in creating a new, integrated network architecture and infrastructure based on interoperable convergence of LANs, WANs, I/O, storage area networks (SANs), and municipal area networks.

E-business datacenters host the business-critical enterprise applications that fuel revenue-generating operations such as e-commerce, BI, and decision support, according to the report. Enterprise applications for CRM, EDI, ERP, enterprise application integration, and supply chain management drive application software revenue, which will reach $120 billion in 2004, according to Strategic Research. As enterprises increasingly adopt these large applications, their need for data storage, network management, and reliable access to data and applications will only increase.

To support growing storage demand, the datacenter storage market will grow from $37.8 billion in 2000 to $76.7 billion in 2005, despite slow growth rates during the economic decline of 2001, according to the report. The storage networking infrastructure market, including host bus adapters, hubs, routers, switches, and other components, will expand 44 percent per year from 2000 to 2005, when it reaches $8.7 billion.

The character of storage systems will also change from 2001 to 2005, according to Strategic Research. In 2001, 41 percent of disk array revenue came from external storage systems (35 percent from SANs and 6 percent from network attached storage). By 2005, external storage will claim 76 percent of revenue, with SANs accounting for 61 percent alone (amounting to $40 billion in 2005). The growth cycle for tape drives and automated tape libraries will begin to decline in 2004-2005.

The report predicts that future datacenters will incorporate optical channels and interconnected network fabrics, support a range of protocols, and feature functionally distributed — though centrally managed — intelligence. Server and storage disaggregation, as well as the move to the new InfiniBand I/O infrastructure technology, will also be significant trends as datacenters evolve.

— Peggy Aycinena

Peggy Aycinena (peggy_aycinena@yahoo.com) is a freelance technology writer based in Silicon Valley.

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