Here we are, a few pounds heavier and feasting on left over turkey and pie and it is time for our first annual state of the storage market perspective.  When surveying the storage market I am amazed by the number of startup players that are present in the space and the apparent lack of understanding that leaders of these companies have in regards to what consumers really want.  When you look at the customer base, they are looking for one of two things.

 1.  A Highly flexible and well integrated solution to backbone their storage infrastructure

and/or

2. An extremely agressive price.

 In the first category the usual suspects (EMC, HDS, IBM and NetApp) fill out the crowd with ever increasing options on ways to deploy the storage and ensure that customers use more of their annual spend with their primary vendor.  This segment will continue to be fairly static with vendors shifting percentage of market share between them over the next 12 months..

The second category is a bit more diverse with players like NexSAN, Equalogic (now Dell), SNAP, Storvault (a NetApp company) and many others taking various chunks of the market.  The shifts in this segment are likely to change dramatically in the next year.  Dell, as a marketting machine will continue to grow their storage business and perhaps take more of it the Equalogic path, thus hurting EMC.  Expect new startups to emerge this year and shake things up and stand ready for the possibility that NetApp will get on the horse with Storvault and really figure out how to market the device to its full potential. 

 Our prediction for year end of 2008 is that StorVault will experience a significant growth and that our friends at EMC will be wishing that Michael Dell loved them more.  The growth in the StorVault product will be directly related to NetApp releasing Enterprise class functionality to the SMB market allowing them to truly realize the full potential of their storage.  I would also look for a grid based storage server to emerge that offers both block (iSCSI/FCP) and NAS functions similar to NetApp.  While not gaining huge ground next year, the stage will be set for a massive battle between David and the Phillistines.

 It should be an interesting year.