Virtualization and Cloud to Boost FC Market Growth

In a new SAN forecast report by Dell’Oro Group, a source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, FC switch and adapter revenues are forecast to rise to $2.8B in 2016 at a CAGR of about 3%.

"Virtualization and cloud initiatives have driven tremendous growth in the datacenter, providing new and exciting opportunities in storage," said Casey Quillin, analyst at Dell’Oro Group.

"In order to benefit from the inherent flexibility provided by the ‘provisioning on demand’ feature of server virtualization, the storage available to these virtual servers also needs to be flexible and able to scale. SAN storage virtualization has the potential to address these concerns and we expect FC to realize a boost from this trend. Additionally, cloud storage is generating interest as enterprises seek to realize the cost savings provided by outsourcing some of their storage needs to the Cloud. This increasing demand is requiring cloud storage service providers to grow their storage infrastructure on a massive scale and we predict this to have a positive impact on FC growth as well," stated Quillin.

The report also discusses alternative SAN technologies, such as FCoE. Vendors currently shipping FCoE enabled equipment include Cisco, HP, Brocade, Juniper, Emulex, and QLogic.