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A global industry effort promoting the adoption of grid computing in enterprises is expected to push up demand for more advanced storage infrastructure in China.
According to storage systems maker Network Appliance,  this initiative could also open more opportunities for the company to expand across the mainland.
Grid computing is the ability to harness  computing and data resources in a network or connected networks to create a single, virtual system, which grants  users seamless, low-cost access to vast information technology capabilities.
Network Appliance executives noted that grid computing was already being established in the academic, research and technical sectors of China and other parts of the world.
The mainland government pledged last year to invest up to 100 million yuan  to build the China National Grid Project.
  This will link its main academic computer network sites in Beijing and Shanghai to other locations, including Xian Jiaotong University  and the University of Hong Kong, and integrate them into one system.
Network Appliance, along with some of the world's leading IT suppliers, sees plenty of room in the enterprise sector for grid computing and 'grid storage' to grow.
Andrew Hu,  Network Appliance managing director for North Asia, said: 'Today, the Chinese government is using technology as a tool to help modernise the country, and data storage has an important role to play in this process.'
The Silicon Valley-based company, known widely as NetApp,  is one of the founding members of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA),  an independent, vendor-neutral consortium created in April to develop open and interoperable enterprise grid systems and drive the deployment of grid computing worldwide.
 Other founding members include IT industry heavyweights Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, EMC, Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC and Sun Microsystems.  
Initial focus areas for the EGA include the development of grid computing reference models, provisioning, security and accounting methods.
Mr Hu said there was great potential in China, where  enterprises would need the relevant storage infrastructure to support their growing IT requirements.
'Demand for storage is growing among large, state-controlled enterprises. Rapid new business growth, membership of the World Trade Organisation and population growth are all factors driving data storage expansion in the private sector,' he said.
NetApp previously estimated  its share in China's data storage market would be   relatively small compared with  IBM, HP, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and Sun.
But Jeff Hornung,  vice-president and general manager of NetApp's gateway business unit, said that the future of networked enterprise data would be grid storage, which was supposed to deliver tighter application integration with database and enterprise applications in any grid computing environment.
Brad Nisbet,  program manager at research firm International Data Corp, said: 'Customers across all price segments of the market are looking to consolidate and simplify their infrastructure through networked storage.'



NetApp sees grid solution for China storage