7% or 150,000 Servers Shipped With FCoE Capable Network Connections in 1Q11

A recently published report by Dell’Oro Group indicates that approximately 7 percent of servers, or 150,000 units, shipped with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capable network connections in the first quarter of 2011.

Most of those server connections were driven by HP blade servers with Emulex FCoE LAN on Motherboard (LOM). Not all HP’s blade servers were operating FCoE, but the rate of adoption more than doubled sequentially during the quarter.

"HP, in its first full quarter of end-to-end FCoE connectivity in its ProLiant BladeSystem, captured 23 percent of FCoE switch market port shipments," said Tam Dell’Oro, President of Dell’Oro Group. "Cisco, the ‘small but mighty’ blade server market new entrant, differentiates its UCS blade servers by connecting them all with FCoE, and is the market share leader in overall FCoE switch shipments," added Dell’Oro.

The report discusses the growth in FCoE during the first quarter, amidst Cisco just beginning its product transition to its new generation FCoE switches. It also discusses the progress of Dell and IBM FCoE connectivity within the blade servers.

Comments

150,000 units were shipped with FCoE capable network connections in 1Q11 according to Dell'Oro. That's a small figure when you consider that more than two million servers have been sold worldwide during the same period for Gartner.

Even if the rate of adoption more than doubled sequentially during the quarter for Dell'Oro, FCoE remains an emerging tiny market despite a lot of buzz and offerings from Atto, Brocade, Chelsio, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HDS, IBM, Mellanox, NetApp, QLogic, etc.

The FCoE standard for a common addressing structure was adopted in February 2008 by the Fibre Channel Industry Association and its the T11 Technical Committee. More than four years ago and for few implementations.

Why to adopt FCoE, used to encapsulate FC frames over Ethernet to consolidate IP and SAN traffic using a single network, when you can get iSCSI and NAS at lower prices? Why to adopt FCoE with 10GbE when 16Gb FC is already available from Brocade with a complete portfolio (and resold by EMC), Emulex for HBAs (at the catalog of IBM) now, and other ones tomorrow. In spite of its acquisition of Foundry in Ethernet in November 2008, Brocade continues to be more successful and get more revenues from FC than Ethernet, and tiny ones from FCoE.

Big enterprises are not ready, prefer FC SAN and continue to follow the smooth transition they already did from 1Gb to 2Gb, 4Gb, 8Gb and tomorrow 16Gb FC for their independent storage silos that cannot be attacked by hackers like with Ethernet, rather than to invest in new expansive infrastructure.

Read also:

Myth: Single FCoE Data Center Network = Fewer Ports, Less Complexity and Lower Costs
According from an analyst from Gartner

Why FCoE? Why not just NAS and iSCSI?