Storage in the Year 2000, Part 2

Noted Gartner Dataquest analyst Carolyn DiCenzo released her annual report about the state of the storage market. DiCenzo found that the storage software market segment has shifted from 80 percent backup and recovery products to about 44 percent. She estimates that storage infrastructure (data replication and virtualization) will be the leading software segment within a couple of years, followed by backup and recovery, and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).

According to DiCenzo, in 2000, the entire storage management market grew by 28.5 percent to a total value of $5.3 billion. Among the categories she includes in this segment are server-based software, software shipped with disk arrays, appliance software, and storage networking products. When vendors bundled software as part of a hardware package, DiCenzo didn't count that revenue in the totals.

The Gartner Dataquest analysis broke down the market into these segments: storage infrastructure, which accounted for 37 percent of the market; data management, 44 percent; and Enterprise Storage Resource Management (ESRM), 19 percent. Gartner DataQuest forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26 percent for the storage market over the next 5 years, so that by 2005, storage software will be a $16.7-billion market. Leading storage vendors included EMC, with 25.5 percent of the market; VERITAS, 16.3 percent; IBM (with Tivoli), 16.1 percent; Computer Associates (CA), 11.7 percent; BMC, 4.3 percent; Network Appliance, 3 percent; StorageTek, 2.7 percent; Compaq, 2.7 percent; Legato, 2.7 percent; Hewlett-Packard (HP), 1.7 percent; and all others, 13.4 percent.

By software category, host-based backup and HSM/archive products grew very little in 2000, with the network backup subsegment growing just 19 percent—down considerably from previous years. DiCenzo attributes this poor growth to CA's and Legato's financial difficulties, even though VERITAS did well with NetBackup.

Analysts predict that the storage infrastructure segment will grow by 30 percent CAGR. Top vendors in this category include EMC, VERITAS, Network Appliance, Compaq, and PowerQuest. DiCenzo attributed VERITAS's second spot to the strong performance of its file system and volume manager products. Data replication products also did well in 2000, and Compaq and Network Appliance benefited from this trend. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, and IBM are chasing the array-replication software market. The host-based replication market segment includes companies such as CA, Fujitsu Softek, Legato, NSI, PowerQuest, VERITAS, and Sun Microsystems.

Gartner DataQuest expects the (Enterprise Storage Resource Management) (ESRM) market, which DiCenzo characterizes as fragmented, to grow by 32 percent CAGR over a 5-year period. EMC's Symmetrix Management tools led the market, followed by CA, StorageTek, IBM, and BMC. This category includes the new Storage Area Network (SAN) visualization tools, such as VERITAS's SANPoint Control and HP's OpenView Storage Area Manager Suite. BMC, Compaq, IBM/Tivoli, and SANavigator are developing new SAN management software products with a small, installed base that will grow considerably in this category over the next couple of years.

DiCenzo notes that the storage management market "continues to provide new and stronger tools, but these tools are more point products than total solutions. The desired goal is a suite of software with plug-in modules that can be geared to customer needs and storage topologies. This, of course, was the vision for network and system management—vision that has not yet been realized. . . . Over the next 5 years, new tools will begin to appear that will help users manage their storage networking environments. Just how big a help these tools will be will depend on the complexity of the environment and the storage software vendor to incorporate management of the multivendor components."

Gartner Dataquest gathers market-share numbers by asking each vendor to provide data about its sales (in some cases, this information is public record) and crosschecks with other sources to ensure accuracy. DiCenzo's complete report, "Storage Management Software: 2000 Market Share" (April 24, 2001)," is available through the Gartner Dataquest.