- Over the next three years, humans will generate more original information than was created in the previous 300,000 years (study by SIMS, UCal Berkeley)
- How much is that? In 1999, the world created 1.5 exabytes of unique information, which is equivalent to 1.5 billion gigabytes, or 250 megabytes of new information for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth (study by SIMS, UCal Berkeley)
- The typical Global 2000 company doubles the amount of data they own every year
- Storage can now account for 50 – 75% of an IT system’s cost
- To help handle this unbelievable increase in information, the SAN market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 1999 to $10.8 billion in 2003; NAS from $1.3 billion in 1999 to $6.5 billion in 2003 (IDC)
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- SAN and NAS storage solutions are converging, and will shortly be viewed as complementary.
- Storage over IP is quickly becoming a reality and will compete with Fibre Channel as a viable storage interface.
- Because of its throughput and industry-wide adoption, Fibre Channel will continue to be the standard for SAN implementations.
- e-Business and Web-based applications will continue to generate huge amounts of data and will increase the need for reliability, accessibility, security and availability.
- Disk-based storage will continue to replace tape, given the falling costs and better features.
- Service providers and web hosts (particularly Saps and Asps) are helping to speed SAN and Clustering implementations, and to reduce the need for in-house expertise.
- The increased need for load balancing caused by the need to keep Web-based systems accessible and high performing will continue, and drive development of improved hardware and software load balancers.
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SAN Program 
