Aside from businesses, homes also are seen as a possible new and vast market for data storage products. With consumers storing more and more audio and video files, computer makers have begun selling equipment to hold and manage the data. Bobroff says the home storage arena is on the company's radar, and notes Intel also has a "digital home" initiative.
Commoditisation comes to storage
Another factor that may pave the way for an Intel-led charge toward cheaper storage boxes is that a number of storage technologies are becoming commoditised, Freund said. Disk drives are one example, he said. He also pointed to a relatively new disk drive interface, Serial ATA. This is a higher-performance upgrade to the ATA interface common to desktop computer disk drives, and in most cases offers a cheaper alternative to drives using the higher-end SCSI interface, Freund said.
Freund doesn't expect Intel itself to go so far as to assemble storage white boxes, but to work with partners, such as Asia-based manufacturers. He suggests Intel could provide chips with integrated storage functions, storage motherboard products and "increasingly complete reference models, including third-party software components."
If Intel actively seeks to rev up a commodity industry in storage, it would be following a familiar path. Over the years, the company has helped generate a market in low-end servers by offering manufacturers chips, chipsets, motherboards, reference designs and even servers that contain everything but a few easily integrated components like memory. Manufacturers can decide how little, or much, technology they want to buy.
Kraftway, a Russian server maker, and Chinese giant Legend Holdings both have purchased complete Intel servers and then subsequently adjusted them for their respective local markets. So have IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell in certain markets.
Talkback
Yes - storage commodotisation is on the way