Maxtor is expecting an increased take-up of rack-based storage will replace pedestal servers because it offers better scalability and modularity.
John Joseph, vice president of marketing for Maxtor's service products group, recently completed a tour of the Asia-Pacific region and said one emerging trend in customer feedback was the use of rack-based solutions.
He said this gives customers a new and more flexible "buy as you grow" business proposal.
"It allows [customers] to buy storage for 12 months and re-evaluate, rather than planning ahead for the next five years," he said. "It's all about scalability and modularity."
Joseph also predicts desktop and high end markets will converge.
"Historically, the desktop and corporate markets have been separated but now products are being developed to suit both.
"Desktop and high end devices could never be plugged into the same system blindly but that is something we see for the future," said Joseph.
Maxtor believes Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Korea will be the big Asia-Pacific growth areas. The Australian market is expected to grow by 60 per cent by 2006.
But India is highlighted as the boom market with a predicted growth of 87 per cent during the same period due to its high levels of computer literacy.
The storage giant also predicts the world market will have a compound growth rate of six per cent during the next three years with biotechnology, genomics, web services, e-banking and e-commerce envisaged as sectors to watch.
As for storage competition, Joseph believes the HDD industry has reached a point where "too many players are competing for a fixed profit pool".
"Some companies are struggling out there and it's a process of natural selection," he said. "The car industry had 100 companies at the turn of the last century but now there are only three major players in the US. The hard drive industry is going in the same direction."
According to Joseph, a combination of in-house figures and those from market analyst IDC gave Maxtor a 26 per cent share of the HDD world market for 2001 - with Seagate at 21 per cent and IBM 16 per cent. He believes Maxtor's latest developments, including its new Atlas enterprise class hard drives, stands the company in good stead to consolidate its position in the market.
"The Atlas 10K is a value play and will exist for some time because it has good capacity and performance levels. It outperforms competitors by between five and 10 per cent over a range of configurations," he claimed.
"By 2005, we still see it representing a 50-50 share of our supply with the new Atlas 15k," he added.
He said the 15K, available by the end of the year, would boast a seek time of 3.2msec, making it the fastest hard disk drive in the world.
