Commitment to infrastructure will trigger market growth

China is set to become Asia's hotspot for storage area network (SAN) projects as industries boost investment in strategic systems redundancy and business continuity technologies.

According to Brocade Communications Systems chairman and chief executive Greg Reyes, China's admission into the World Trade Organisation will make companies compete by using SANs for storing, managing, administering and providing access to an increasing amount of business-critical data.

'With the Government's commitment to developing its strategic infrastructure, China will become one of the fastest-growing markets for SANs in the region and make up 10 per cent of the Asian market for Brocade over the short-term,' he said.

'The Asia-Pacific market accounts for about 15 per cent of Brocade's sales worldwide. With the expected growth in China, we see the region making up 20 to 25 per cent of total business within a few years.'

A SAN links computing devices to disk or tape arrays and other storage devices over fibre-channel technology, which transmits data between computers at up to one gigabit per second. SANs support disk mirroring, back-up and restore, archiving and retrieval of data, movement of data from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among servers in a corporate network.

Founded in 1995, Silicon Valley-based Brocade is a leading vendor of networking switches and software designed to optimise data availability and storage, server, and personnel resources in enterprises. Its main market rivals include QLogic, McData and Inrange.

'In markets such as China, where IT infrastructure is being built out, companies and government agencies have the opportunity to base storage infrastructure on a networking model to eliminate the scalability and management limitations of a traditional direct-attached storage model. A reliable, scalable, secure and manageable platform for networking storage is a strategic part of enterprise IT infrastructure, and Brocade is committed to expanding SAN expertise and resources for our regional partners and their customers,' Mr Reyes said.