The advent of SANs and its confluence with LANs, WANs and optical networking Telecom technologies is poised to transform the latent demand for Web Storage into reality and ready for explosive growth. The much-anticipated convergence of storage and network traffic is moving closer to reality through a pair of competing standards initiatives from the biggest names in network infrastructure and a handful of start-ups. A total of four proposals touting storage over IP are currently being submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force for consideration as standards.

Client/Server computing, by dispersing data across heterogeneous computing platforms created non-sharing, uncooperative network of islands of information creating horrendous storage management problems and, in the process, escalating corporate data management costs. SANs directly connect disparate servers with centralized shared storage locally or over extended distances by using fibre channel interconnect devices. Market acceptance is burgeoning on the heels of defacto interoperability standards promulgated by SNIA and EMC Alliance groups. Market for SAN devices and systems is poised to grow from $9B in 2000 to $25B by 2004. Some killer applications include serverless backup of disk storage to tape without server intervention boosting application performance; web enablement of data for storage in centralized repository and universal access and management; remote copy of data/data vaulting enabling disaster protection; high availability using clustering of servers or storage; and simplified, centralized, scalable storage management.

Dedicated Network-Attached Storage (NAS) is the preferred implementation for any organization currently using or planning on deploying general-purpose file servers. Users report that better performance, significantly lower operational costs, and improved client/user satisfaction typically result from installing and using specialized NAS platforms. A number of factors are fueling the explosion in demand for storage including the meteoric rise in Internet, Intranets and Extranets, Electronic Commerce using Multimedia Content, Data Warehousing / Visual Databases Decision Support, Rapid decline in disk storage prices. Streaming Applications, Multimedia/Imaging, DVD driven Applications - Linear Movies/Interactive Video Entertainment, Coexistence of UNIX and Scalable NT as dominant Open Systems etc. NAS revenue is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% during 1999-2003 timeframe, with majority of growth coming from appliance storage servers.

In the eCommerce world with worldwide customers in all time-zones, 24x7 uptime has simply become mandatory. Long required for mission-critical applications in industries such as finance, process manufacturing, airlines and telecommunications, continuous availability of data has become a must in today's internet-based world. Multiple levels of High Availability are defined for hardware, software, operator practices and total systems and specified in terms of uptime (e.g.99.998%)and failover time (in seconds), and form the basis of service level agreements. End to End availability encompasses redundant technologies in client/browsers, networks, internet access, and data retrieval from servers and storage.

In the telecom world, anything less than a 24x7 uptime becomes a matter of life and death. With the explosive rise in internet usage and the convergence of computing, wireless networking, and telecom applications using low-cost off the shelf IP technologies, the old classical networking structures are being shaken to their cores. New services such as unified messaging, fax, video and voice over IP, storage over IP will necessitate the building of high availability into these new telecom equipments.

Newer applications that have global coverage such as e-mail, e-tailing, e-commerce, e-banking etc, require continuous data availability, 24x7 uptime. The converged communications industry demands the same standards of robustness and high availability that have been taken for granted in the telecom industry for decades, the dial tone must become the web tone.

According to IMEX Research, the converged Data/Telecom High Availability market runs over $100 billion in year 2003 while the high availability server market is forecasted to be at $14 billion in shipment revenues

The explosive rise in 24x7 usage of the web, globally, in a myriad of applications from seeking information to business transactions is creative heavy demands on the end-to-end internet infrastructure to provide 24x7 uptime, less than 8sec in page retrieval response time and instantaneous scalability to respond to unpredictability in demand traffic. New technologies from caching, load-balancing, clustering, content-aware switched networking to high bandwidth streaming delivery of data, are all the genius of the internet. The total worldwide market for the Internet Traffic Infrastructure (hardware and software) is poised to reach $110B by 2003.