Storage: special report

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Storage is no small market to cover. In recent years, its importance and prominence has been on the rise and with the future of virtualisation and cloud computing, it is a critical piece of your infrastructure. It's therefore very important to get it right.

We have spoken to those in the know about the sector and in this feature we give you a run down of the hot companies, the hot topics and the hot features you should be looking out for in the storage world.

The big players

There may be an increasing number of companies entering the storage wars but there are a few big players you should keep your eye on.

The top gun is still EMC. A recent report from Gartner on the external controller-based disk storage market showed the company held 27.8 per cent market share in the second quarter of 2010 and, with revenues of over $1 billion (£636 million), it was still more than 10 per cent ahead of its next competitor.

That rival was IBM. Big Blue might have its fingers in a lot of technology pies, but storage makes up a significant portion of its revenue stream. The same Gartner report put it on a market share of 14.8 per cent, which admittedly is well behind EMC, but the $681 million it made in revenue is nothing to be sniffed at.

There are a number of other players including HP, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Fujitsu to name a few, but recently the market hasn't been so much about internal research and development of storage technologies but the buying in of other, smaller firms who are getting the products right.

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