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Apple quietly making inroads into enterprise storage markets

Although Apple hasn\'t made much noise to the effect, the company has consistently been making strong progress in the enterprise markets, especially when it comes to storage.

According to some reports, Apple’s storage products have been selling like hot croissants on a cold Parisian morning and at the end of second quarter of 2005, had shipped 76 petabytes of storage,\" notes gigaom.com, a broadband weblog focused on the next generation internet.

Robert Cox, vice president of research, who tracks the storage business for Gartner says that in 2004, Apple did about $78 million in storage sales and were the No. 12 ranked storage vendor in the world. By the end of 2005, Apple’s storage sales more than doubled around $185 million, edging the Cupertino, Calif.-based company into the 10th spot overall.

\"They have done a good job of selling into the small and medium business market,” Cox said. According to his estimates, nearly 40 percent of XServe RAIDs are connected to non-Mac OS servers.

Cox believes Apple will continue to do well in 2006 and \"should move up a notch or two in the world wide rankings.\" However, the company will have a tougher time thereafter, and will need to transition from current generation technologies such as SATA and embrace SAScsi, a new architecture that can give Apple a big leg-up against fiber channel based storage devices, he said.