IDC said the total new storage capacity expected to ship in Australia in 2003 is 14,480 terabytes, up 43.6 percent over shipments in 2002.
Rather than slowing down, new storage capacity is expected to increase annually by almost 50 percent and by 2007, a total of 73,650TBs will be shipped in that year.
"There are a number of drivers for this growth," Graham Penn, director of Storage Research, IDC Asia-Pacific told ZDNet Australia . The boom, said Penn, comes from spending for e-mail, databases, networking applications, file print applications, Web applications in small and medium businesses and data warehouse/data marts for medium and large organisations.
According to Penn, banking/finance and telecommunication companies remain the strongest investors in new storage, but the investment is broad-based across all industries.
When asked what form of storage users were investing in Penn said: "Networked storage--which is steadily gaining acceptance although there is a long way to go. It really is a necessary condition before you can get storage operational costs under control and before you can realise the full value of the information that has been stored."
"The tier data backup and archive is becoming a new trend, plus the use of (Serial) ATA disks to lower capital costs for some types of data/applications," he added.
On the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation--which requires companies listed in the United States and their subsidiaries to keep financial records for seven years--on storage spending, Penn said there's no impact in Australia to date although storage vendors are talking about it.
"I have noticed some impact in government circles, and awareness of the issues is increasing," said Penn. "I think it will need a major event/disaster/case to quickly raise the level of awareness to the point that it becomes a major driver."
