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capacity desktop disk drives into enterprise class storage systems. One example of user application inthis segment is the growing trend of replacing magnetic tape systems with disk storage systems forfaster back-up and retrieval processes. Another application is specifically targeted at the unique storagerequirements in support of long-term data storage driven by new legislation, e.g. images of signedchecks. This market segment was dominated by high capacity ATA and SATA disk drives in 2005 but asthe market develops new technologies, such as SAS, are also expected to be deployed to addressspecific market requirements. Additionally, according to IDC, disk storage systems connecting to SANsthrough iSCSI protocol will grow from less than $119 million in 2004 to $4.6 billion in 2009,representing a compound annual growth rate of 108.2% during the period.Networked storage offers numerous benefits, including the ability to share data across anorganization using different computing systems, simplified management through centralizedadministration of multiple storage devices, and scalability by allowing the number of storage devices ona network to be increased without interrupting data access. The market for Fabric SAN attachedStorage Systems is comprised of the Fibre Channel & iSCSI technology sub markets. Using dataprovided by IDC we estimate that the Fabric SAN revenues had over 90% share of the total SANmarket in 2005. We also estimate that the market for Fabric SAN attached Storage Systems, will growfrom $7.4 billion in 2004 to $14.5 billion by 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of14.4%. IDC also project the NAS market to grow from $1.8 billion in 2004 to $3.3 billion in 2009,representing a compound annual growth rate of 12.9%. These two network storage market segmentsare gaining market share within the overall external storage systems market, which is projected to growfrom $15.3 billion dollars in 2004 to $20.9 billion in 2009, representing a compound annual growth rateof 6.4%. The combined market share of NAS and Fabric SAN was 60.6% of the external storagesystems market in 2004 and is estimated to grow to 85% in 2009, at the expense of the Direct AttachedStorage legacy technology base. The networked storage market segments are the fastest growingsegments of the external Storage Systems technology market as a result of companies migrating theirstorage environments away from direct server-attached architectures.These storage networks enable the widespread distribution of data and provide easier access toshared information. However, they also place a strain on the ability of enterprises to manage businesscriticaldata. Furthermore, the mission-critical nature of much enterprise data has placed a premium ondata management software applications that provide reliability, availability and scalability in complexheterogeneous computing environments. As a result, major OEMs are increasingly allocating internalresources and developing strategies to provide software and service solutions to address thisopportunity while developing strategic relationships with storage subsystem vendors to outsourceincreasingly complex hardware subsystem requirements.The increasing amount of data that needs to be stored and accessed with the appropriate level offlexibility and reliability presents a significant challenge to data storage system design. The fundamentalchallenge faced by information technology managers is to effectively manage the high-growth rate ofdata and to make that data available across their organizations in a reliable and scalable fashion. Theadvent of RAID and other networked storage technologies have helped address many of thecomplexities associated with the management of increased amounts of data. RAID storage subsystemsconsist of multiple disk drives together with a controller device that manages access to data stored onthe disk drives. The controller manages access to the data so that if a disk drive fails, other disk drivesin the RAID subsystem can be used to recover data that was lost from the affected disk drive.Due to their high levels of performance and reliability, RAID storage systems have become theprevailing technology for businesses where data availability is of critical importance. Historically, wehave addressed this need by either integrating our storage enclosures with either our customer’s storagecontroller or specialist third party controller technology. The adoption rate of RAID enabled dataprotection strategies has been less marked in the Entry sub-segment and certain Mid Rangesub-segments, which service the Small and Medium Enterprise, or SME, sector. However, affordable23