While Appleis 2004 storage sales of US$78 million placed the company number 12 worldwide, last year it more than doubled that revenue to $185 million and leaped into the 10th spot, according to Gartner vice-president of research Robert Cox. He told the Web site Smarthouse: "They have done a good job of selling into the small and medium business market."

The analyst estimated that almost 40% of the Xserve RAID set-ups sold by Apple are hooked to servers running operating systems other than Mac OS X, which puts the company "in a good and growing market; [they] have done a good job of building a reliable and easy-to-use device from commodity components." He also said that, on a gigabyte-per-dollar basis, Appleis Xserve RAID "is the best in the world for Fibre Channel storage, and [it] trumps most SCSI storage solutions as well."

To maintain its momentum, the company needs to "embrace SAScsi, a new architecture that can give Apple a big leg up against Fibre Channel-based storage devices."

Thanks to Macworld UK for the link.