Tightened spending on technology by recession-weary companies across Asia is giving a boost to the nascent market for low-priced, network-attached storage (NAS) appliances.
Tape drive specialist Quantum, which sells its Snap Servers to the NAS market, saw demand growing from the region's large number of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and from large corporations with many branch offices.
Competition comes from Network Appliances and EMC, which offers more expensive models. NAS devices support requirements for file archiving, data backup and portable field storage, with little maintenance.
Quantum business development manager for Asia-Pacific Wong Chuan Yong said the region's SMEs were coping with rapid data growth by using available NAS technologies which could work seamlessly with existing storage environments and emerging storage-area networks (SAN).
Some of Asia's biggest NAS users include large banks, which are making the most of tighter technology budgets by adding NAS capacity for backup or general network file-serving tools.
Mr Wong said: 'As paper transactions steadily decrease and online banking and trading continue to grow, the financial industry is experiencing unprecedented demand for network storage. In a time when network administrators across all industries are closely monitoring their information technology spending, NAS systems offer storage capacity at prices which are a fraction of traditional general-purpose file servers.'
A NAS appliance, including Quantum's Snap Server, is hard-disk storage attached to a local-area network and assigned its own Internet protocol address. By removing storage access and its management from a department's server computer, NAS-based application programming and files can be served faster because they are not competing for the same processor resources. This technique can be a step towards, or part of, a more sophisticated SAN environment.