Even if companies put off purchases of new computers or software, they still need to store the constantly growing piles of data needed to run their businesses. But recently, some clouds have started to gather over the otherwise sunny storage market. It now projects growth ranging from 25 to 35 percent, down from prior forecasts of 33 to 38 percent.
Investors are nervous.
The shares of EMC and its rival, Network Appliance of Sunnyvale, have been falling in the past two months. Since January, EMC shares are down 29 percent and Network Appliance has tumbled 44 percent. Later this week, at a conference on storage stocks sponsored by Lehman Brothers in San Francisco, investors hope to get some new insights into the industry. Network Appliance was founded in 1992 to develop low-cost storage devices designed as appliances that do one thing reliably. NAS devices are dedicated to only storage, without the complexity of traditional storage devices that are part of big computer servers.