FibreChannel SAN interconnection market to grow 15% to USD946m in 2002
15 August 2002 -- Worldwide revenues for FibreChannel SAN interconnection hardware products grew 36% from first-half 2001 to second-half 2001, and 15% from a total USD822m in 2001 to USD946m in 2002, says Infonetics Research in its biannual market share and forecast service, which tracks and forecasts 1G and 2G FibreChannel SAN products (protocols such as iSCSI, Gigabit Ethernet, ESCON, FICON, DWDM, and Infiniband are to be covered in future editions).
"End-users in North America are significantly increasing their use of storage interconnection products (68% of large organisations will use them by 2004), and hosting service providers are increasing their data centre storage capacity by an average of 18% by next year," said author Neil Osipuk, who is directing analyst for Infonetics Research's data centres and hosting coverage. "Disaster recovery and business continuity plans will continue to drive the demand for outsourcing storage to hosting service providers."
Growth will be driven by the transition from 1G to 2G technologies as vendors begin shipping 2G in volume and pricing drops closer to 1G pricing by late 2002.
For 2001 product shipments, North America leads EMEA and Asia Pacific. The mix and growth rates among geographies is expected to remain stable through 2002.
Companies tracked include Brocade, Cisco, Gadzoox, Inrange, McData, Nishan Systems, QLogic, and Vixel. Brocade is the market share leader for both 1G and 2G FibreChannel revenues and ports; McData is second for 1G FibreChannel.
Infonetics Research says that future editions of its biannual SAN interconnection hardware products market share and forecast service will also track Adaptec, ADIC, Andiamo, CNT, Compaq, Crossroads Systems, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Mellanox, Paceline, Pirus, SAN Valley Systems, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems etc.