Storage shipments up by a seventh for broadband and internal networks

Network-attached storage (NAS) for broadband-connected and remote internal systems saw growth of 14.1 per cent in the first three months of 2011.

Gartner reports revenues up by the percentage - equivalent to roughly a seventh - compared with the previous year.

Overall, the global external controller-based disk storage market reached $5 billion (£3 billion) for the three-month period.

Controller-based external NAS is often used in larger corporate networks, where files need to be available to multiple different machines that share resources like disk space and a superfast broadband connection.

This is becoming particularly important with the rise of virtualisation, where a single machine may run more than one application in virtual, separate partitions.

Alternatively, several physical machines can pool their resources, giving a greater amount of memory and processing power to a single large application and enabling it to run faster.

Roger Cox, research vice-president at Gartner, says the 10.6 per cent annual growth seen in block-access external controller-based disk storage in particular reflects "storage infrastructure refreshments" and virtualised server deployments.