8Gb FC HBA Port Shipments Doubled Sequentially

A recently published report by Dell’Oro Group, a source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, indicates that total Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (FC HBA) port shipments grew moderately in the second quarter of 2009, in large part due to a very large increase (albeit from a small base) in port shipments of 8 Gbps FC HBAs, which doubled sequentially to almost 60 thousand ports. In addition, sales from 8 Gbps FC HBAs grew to over 10 percent of total FC HBA sales for both Emulex and QLogic during the quarter, and will likely make significant sales contributions to both firms over the coming months. 
 
“The Fibre Channel Adapter market is finally benefiting from users migrating to the higher-priced, higher-speed products,” said Seamus Crehan, Vice President of Dell’Oro Group. “We believe the main driver for this strong growth in 8 Gbps FC HBAs – aside from a general stabilization in the broader global economy – was the ramp of Intel’s Xeon 5500 (Nehalem-EP) server platform. This platform, which was launched in March 2009, can enable up to 50 Gbps of server I/O throughput,” added Crehan.