By Telecom Lead Team: The global SAN equipment market
grew 2 percent in Q3 2011 over Q2 2011, to $764 million, as SAN switch sales
increased while SAN adapter sales declined.
network convergence strategy adopted by key players .
Just over a year ago, Brocade had about twice the market
share of Cisco in overall SAN equipment revenue, but the success of its data
center network has propelled Cisco to within 8 market share points
of Brocade in Q3 2011.
In the SAN adapter space, QLogic and Emulex still hold
majority share of the combined host bus adapters (HBA) and converged network
adapters (CAN) segment in Q3 2011.
Convergence is coming but Fibre Channel is alive and
well in the storage area network equipment market. As predicted, the march
towards data center network convergence continues, with Fibre Channel over
Ethernet (FCoE) SAN switches taking center stage in the third quarter of 2011
with nearly 170 percent year-over-year growth. Not to be discounted, 16G Fibre
Channel also made a big splash with its introduction and first product
shipments,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.
Recently, Infonetics announced
that 70 percent of respondent operators are investing in cloud services in
anticipation of demand. The top operator strategies for offering cloud services
are bundling cloud services with network connectivity services and offering cloud
services over Ethernet or IP VPN services.
Many of the smaller data center providers participating
in Infonetics’ survey plan to keep their business uncomplicated by moving from
simple collocation support offerings to IaaS via the addition of computer and
storage hardware, rather than getting into the complexities of offering OS
software platforms.
