TheInfoPro (TIP) has released Wave 4 of its study of the storage networking and storage management market. Leading the way in TIP's industry standard "Technology Heat Index" for the Storage Networking Study was once again Serial ATA drives, followed by IP SANs. The proprietary Heat Index factors in the current and planned usage of over 20 different storage networking technologies, prioritizing them based on near-term spending. New York City based TIP investigates key technology sectors in six month intervals or "waves" by interviewing hundreds of decision makers, pre-screened for domain expertise, for an average of one hour. Known as the "voice of the customer," thousands of IT professionals, technology providers and institutional investors rely on TIP research for robust vendor spending and ratings data, technology adoption overlaying vendors poised to benefit and rich narrative commentary. "We continue to see the move to tiered storage," noted TIP's CEO and founder Ken Male. "In Wave 3, Serial ATA and Tier 2 SAN was hot; in addition NAS growth was booming in the Fortune 1000 enterprise. Now, six months later we find that almost 40 percent of our commentator base has ATA drives installed. As the early adopters get comfortable with the usage characteristics, they like what they are seeing as it relates to performance and reliability. Originally, we have seen ATA used as a staging media before backing up to tape. We may see the usages of ATA change when we conduct the Wave 5 study in Q1 of 2005." Male said, "This is the first wave of our study where the word 'commodity' was used as it relates to the networked storage infrastructure. When combined with the big interest in adopting IP SANs one finds a storage professional with many options and the ability to not treat all data equally -- which is something they have wanted since they first adopted SANs." NAS growth while still strong is not at the torrid pace seen in early studies. According to Male, "The Fortune 1000's we interview doubled their NAS capacity wave over wave however looking out into 2005 they are not anticipating the growth to be as high." Also scoring highly were: Data Archiving solutions and Asynchronous Remote Data Mirroring, which reflects the continued influence of regulations and business continuance strategies. Virtual Tape rounded out the top five and was the biggest gainer compared to the Wave 3 Study released in Q1 of 2004 where it was in the bottom quartile. Solid State Disk was the "coldest" of the technologies based on budget allocations for the coming year. Specific to the Storage Networking competitive landscape, hundreds of vendor ratings are collected and become the foundation of TIP's proprietary Promise Index and Fulfillment Index: * SAN Market: EMC still experiences competition from HDS and IBM. HDS is once again the highest rated vendor while HP ratings continue to decline. Storage pros cite the SAN growth to be in Tier 2 products, where some vendors are rated much differently compared to their Tier I offering. * NAS Market: TIP's Fortune 1000 sample is dominated by Network Appliance in terms of number and quality of ratings; however more commentators are considering an alternative provider compared to Wave 3. * Switch Market: Cisco, the new entrant, received significant ratings for the first time in Wave 4 and rated above average. Both Brocade and McDATA continue to rate well, with Brocade leading all Switch Vendors in TIP's Fulfillment Index. Consistent with previous studies, storage pros are not overly excited with intelligence residing in the Switch, saying it is not compelling enough to change from current array and host based methods. TIP also asks about vendors who have exciting new technologies and products. Vendors with alternatives to Tape Backup garnered many citations in Wave 4 including: FalconStor, COPAN, StorageTek, Network Appliance, Avamar and DataDomain. Other vendors mentioned included for a broad range of exciting technologies included a mix of industry veterans: EMC, IBM and VERITAS, along with emerging vendors including: AppIQ, CreekPath, Acopia and Maranti.