The storage-appliance market is maturing. Startup Isilon Systems Inc. has unveiled an appliance that's good for just one thing: handling video streaming files and other rich content.

The appliances will include high-speed processing and lots of input/output components capable of handling several simultaneous users reading the data-intensive files. Some customers are running trials on the appliances this week. The product has not been named and pricing has not been set, but Isilon plans to ship it in the fall.

Steve Duplessie, an Enterprise Storage Group analyst, hasn't seen the appliance yet but says any box focused on video streaming could work better on that app than do general-purpose appliances and could find growing interest in a growing market. Says Duplessie, "We expect videolike apps to grow from 15% of the data today to 50% or more of it by 2006."