Kevin Komiega's Storage Blog Archives for March 2010

March 19, 2010 -- The Fibre Channel SAN market is experiencing record growth and, as it does, the main players in Fibre Channel networking are fighting harder than ever for market share as converged networking gains traction.

Recently released data from the Dell'Oro Group shows that the Fibre Channel SAN market experienced a broad-based, record sequential revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, with both Fibre Channel switch and host bus adapter segments posting large increases.

According to the firm's "SAN Quarterly Report," Brocade, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic, had "strong sequential performances that helped propel the market to expand more than 15% quarter-over-quarter."

Seamus Crehan, vice president of Dell'Oro Group, said "the server upgrade cycle that started in the second quarter of 2009 was…a key driver of the Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter growth, especially 8Gbps."

Even more interesting is expected impact of unified fabric/converged networking technologies, specifically Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) running on converged network adapters (CNA).

The Dell'Oro Group's "SAN 5-Year Forecast Report," predicts that FCoE will be "a major growth contributor to both the Fibre Channel HBA market and the Ethernet network adapter market."

In a recent discussion about the HP-Cisco divorce, Taneja Group founder and consulting analyst Arun Taneja said converged networking is creating its own set of wars in the IT industry.

"The industry has become smart enough to say that Fibre Channel is not going anywhere. It's a sacred technology, but if you give me the same Fibre Channel that I am used to today and you want to put it on a different fabric, that's okay with me – hence Fibre Channel over Ethernet," he said. "Two worlds have collided in the form of one card called a converged network adapter that can act as a NIC for Ethernet traffic and support iSCSI or FCoE for Fibre Channel traffic. Broadcomm, Intel, Emulex, and QLogic are all vying for that market."

Taneja said customers are starting to take sides and that the market me be ripe for vendor consolidation.

"The winds are blowing fast and furious for Emulex and QLogic at the expense of Broadcomm and Intel," he said. "Ultimately, the one thing I can see that would bring everything back to a calm state is if Intel was to buy QLogic and Broadcomm buys Emulex."

Check out InfoStor's recent coverage of the Fibre Channel SAN market and FCoE:

HP to resell QLogic's enterprise FC switches

EMC taps QLogic for 8Gbps FC switches

Emulex: Running the Table at HP?

FCoE CNAs: HP/IBM tap Emulex, Cisco taps QLogic

Broadcom makes hostile bid for Emulex

Broadcom Enters Converged Network Adapter War

QLogic sues Emulex, but not over technology

Cisco-HP partnership implodes

Analysts weigh in on HP-Cisco breakup

March 11, 2010 -- Unstructured data is becoming the reigning storage hog in the data center as the network-attached storage (NAS) market continues to grow, while the market for block-access, controller-based disk arrays continues to decline, according to the latest numbers from Gartner.

According to the research firm's latest report ("Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries, 4Q09 Update") the external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market took a severe hit as the economic downturn whacked the market for an 8.6% year-over-year decline from $18 billion in 2008 to $16.3 billion in 2009 – the first annual decline for the market since 2002.

Gartner research vice president, Roger Cox, says the large monolithic/frame-based disk array market declined 21.1%, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, the segment represented less than 30% of the total market.

Cox says, "This result, in part, reflects the advancements that the lower-cost modular disk array systems have made in performance and capacity scalability, as well as robust data services associated with local and remote replication."

Gartner says unstructured data growth is boosting the NAS market as the segment grew 1.4% in '09, while the block-access modular ECB disk storage segment declined 2.8%. The special purpose disk archiving system segment experienced a big drop-off, falling 31.6% in revenue.

EMC remained the market leader in 2009, in part because of its leadership in the monolithic/frame-based, block access modular disk array and special-purpose disk archiving storage systems markets and the acquisition of Data Domain. IBM is second in market share, growing 11.9% in the fourth quarter, according to the report.

Gartner ECB disk storage reports reflect hardware-only revenue, as well as hardware revenue associated with financial leases and managed services.

On a related note, IDC recently released its latest Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker report that shows the external and internal disk array markets experienced the first year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2008. The report also states that the NAS and iSCSI SAN array markets posted modest year-over-year growth (See Dave Simpson's latest blog: "Who are the top 5 array vendors?").

For more info on the ECB disk storage market, check out the full report on Gartner's website. The report includes vendor market share by data access method, price band, channel and operating system segmentation.