By
Philip Churchill on April 15th, 2008
Market analysis firm In-Stat are reporting that the consumer network storage market grew at a faster rate in 2007 compared to 2006, and that it has also more than doubled in the last two years. Although competition in this market has increased with more players, opportunities can be captured, including NAS, SAN, NDAS, and Windows Home Server platforms.
Vendors had been waiting for consumers to catch up with their network storage offerings, but that has begun to change. “However, many consumers are still not familiar with LAN-capable storage products,” says Joyce Putscher, In-Stat analyst. “Consumer education is likely to benefit from Windows Home Server (WHS) partners.”
Recent research by In-Stat found the following:
- WHS purchasers will mainly be educated by PC vendors, while traditional network storage purchasers will be educated by networking equipment and storage vendors.
- Capacities over 500GB made solid progress in 2007.
- In-Stat’s industry-leading vendor matrix shows that media serving features continue to penetrate more models, as do remote access and DLNA compatibility.