Date: 24/06/2012

Fibre Channel switch market to strike $2.7B by 2016, Brocade leads: Infonetics

Infonetics Research has released excerpts from its 1st quarter (1Q12) SAN Equipment vendor market share and forecast report.

“We see steady growth ahead for SAN switches and adapters, pushed by social networking, video sharing, data center innovations, and the eventual shift to cloud computing models. Fiber Channel continues to be the real star, with revenue from 16G Fiber Channel products growing at an astounding 52% compound annual growth rate from 2011 to 2016,” expects Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.

Highlights of SAN equipment market:
1. The global storage networking market totaled $1.3 billion in 1Q12, smooth from 4Q11
2. FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs) were a bright spot in the market in 1Q12, up 22% sequentially
3. Brocade continues to be the #1 player in the Fibre Channel SAN switch space, with 70% revenue market share
4. Potential economic difficulties in North America and EMEA remain a concern in relation to service provider capex, as these regions together accounted for somewhat over 70% of the global SAN equipment market

Infonetics’ quarterly SAN Equipment report provides worldwide and regional market size, market share, forecasts, and analysis for Fibre Channel host bus adapters (FC HBAs), iSCSI host bus adapters (iSCSI HBAs), FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs), and chassis and fixed Fibre Channel and all FCoE-capable switches that are purpose-built for the data center (10G FCoE, FC 2G, FC 4G, FC 8G, FC 16G, iSCSI). Companies tracked include Brocade, Chelsio, Cisco, Dell, Emulex, IBM (BNT), Juniper, Mellanox, QLogic, and others.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N