Features

Digital Media Backup to Drive Consumer Network Storage Market

By Sophia Mayengbam

The market for consumer digital media backup today is mostly dominated by low-cost solutions such as USB hard drives and CD, DVD writeable drives. But IT firm ABI Research sees a shift in the market towards the adoption of network storage in the home. The main reason that the firm attributed for the shift is the increasing challenging task of managing digital media.

ABI forecast that the worldwide market for consumer storage will increase from its current nascent state of USD 305 million in 2006 to nearly USD 1.2 billion by 2011.

According to ABI’s study "Consumer Network Storage Market Analysis", currently fewer than 4 percent of those who have home network use some form of network storage device.

"While most consumers today do not have a good understanding of network storage, we believe that over time consumers will be drawn to the benefits of centralized storage and the redundancy these solutions provide," says principal analyst Michael Wolf.

The adoption of network storage In Japan and Europe are ahead of North America driven in part by the fact that the Japanese and European markets are less PC-centric than that of North America. Another reason which ABI cited is the success of vendors such as Buffalo Technology, the worldwide consumer network storage leader, in its home market of Japan.

ABI Research expects that network storage will see increased adoption across all major geographies, even as form factors differ. European markets have seen greater adoption of network storage bridge/adapters such as the Linksys NSLU2, while Japan has seen adoption of more traditional NAS devices.

Consumer storage network vendors are also looking at different ways to improve and give value added features to the customers to have a competitive edge against its rivals. For instance most vendors are also adding media server capabilities to their products.

ABI say that the network storage drive will increasingly become a ‘media tank’ that can serve content around the home, enabled by support of DLNA and UPnP standards as well as more powerful specialized network storage processors.

Vendors which provide products at lower price bundled with value-added services will be preferred by consumers said ABI. According to the Wolf, NAS on Chip (NASoC) processors from the likes of Marvell and Broadcom are helping to create more powerful devices at lower prices.

"In addition to lower prices, consumers are being offered increased flexibility through the inclusion of USB and support for SATA drives, as well as through modular form factors such as Netgear's Storage Central. Increased choice combined with more powerful media serving capabilities at lower price points will increasingly drive consumer demand for these products."


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