IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker® greatly enhances clients' ability to quickly and effectively respond to today's dynamic storage market. Understanding which global markets and segments are growing and knowing the quarterly adoption curve for new products have become business-critical needs for disk storage vendors, supply chain partners, and the Wall Street financial community. This product provides insight into customer trends by delivering geography-specific vendor and product-line detail across all storage segments. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker presents market data in an easy-to-use, interactive format that allows clients to easily view specific submarkets in customizable layouts. IDC's tracker products provide reliable, accurate, and independent market research as a base to create quantitative market analyses and study historical trends.

Technology Coverage and Data Segmentation

This tracker provides total market size and vendor share for the technology areas and segmentations that follow. Measurement for this tracker is in factory revenue, customer revenue, units, and terabytes.

Technologies and subtechnologies:

• Topology: Direct, mainframe networked, and open networked
• Installation: DAS, ESCON, NAS, and SAN
• Protocol: DAS, ESCON-FICON, NAS, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, InfiniBand, iSCSI, and Switched SAS (SAS SAN)
• Operating system: Linux, Unix, Windows, NOS, z/OS, i5/OS, and others
• Redundancy: RAID and JBOD
• Storage architecture: Multiprotocol and non-multiprotocol
• Object-based storage: Object based and non-object based

Segmentations:

• Top vendors by product line
• Price bands
• Storage class: Entry, high-end, and midrange
• Storage location: Internal or external
• Time frame: Quarterly data as of 4Q01

Geographic Scope

• Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) available by 14 countries
• Canada
• Central/Eastern Europe available by 13 countries
• Japan
• Latin America available by 8 countries
• Middle East/Africa available by 17 countries
• United States
• Western Europe available by 16 countries

Delivery Schedule and Deliverables

This tracker is delivered on a quarterly basis via Excel pivot tables and/or Web-based query tools. The delivery schedule for this tracker is as follows:

• Quarterly data files are delivered 10 weeks after the end of each calendar-year quarter.
• One day of onsite training at any location in the United States and inquiry time for supporting questions regarding data usages are provided.
• Quarterly press releases provide analysis into trends, products, or company insights.