Just one year ago the IT industry was totally focused on the implications of the year 2000 and the effects that changing to a new century would have on computer systems. The impact of that event proved far less than anticipated and a year later we shift our focus to more strategic issues, trends, and observations shaping the computing industry. In particular the value of data continues to grow almost exponentially every day. Data (and storage) have become the center of the IT universe, as the computers are now satellites to the data storage infrastructure. Let's review some key trends and observations (factoids) from a variety of sources that may help with storage and networking planning as the New Year begins.
The worldwide Gigabit Ethernet packet switch market reached over 810,000 ports shipped in 2Q 2000, according to Cahners In-Stat Group. The high-tech market research firm expects the overall Gigabit Ethernet switch market to reach almost 4 million units in ports shipped and $4 billion in end-use revenue for 2000, resulting in an all time high: over 200 percent greater than the total number of ports shipped in 1999.
According to a recently published 2000 report "High Availability and Data Protection Practices" from Strategic Research, by 2003, databases will control access to more than 65% of the network's shared data. This further drives the requirement for true heterogeneous and homogeneous data-sharing.
Jupiter Research has released a study with pulse-quickening projections about the growth of the business-to-business commerce market. Jupiter's prediction that B-to-B commerce will expand from $336 million this year to $6.3 trillion in 2005 is likely to raise the heart rate of even the most composed IT administrators as they try to figure out how to accommodate such exponential expansion.
However, Seagate Technology Inc. reckons this time it's got a larger lead on the competition, having taken the capacity on its Barracuda drives from 73GB to 180GB.
Europe's application service provider market will jump from a $275.1M market in 1999 to a $13.7B market in 2005, according to international marketing consulting company Frost & Sullivan.
The picture changed in 2000, according to Internet statistics published in Tele-Geography 2001, this year's compendium of industry statistics from the Washington, DC-based firm. From 1999 to 2000, Internet bandwidth connecting Asian countries grew faster than any other region-to-region route in the world--including Internet bandwidth connected to the U.S. That meant that 13.5 percent of Asia's international Internet capacity was in-region, up from 6.2 percent the previous year. The Asian Internet is becoming less and less U.S.-centric and regional interconnection is on the upswing.
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