$41.7 Billion Spent on SAN Switches and Adapters From 2012 to 2016

Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2nd quarter 2012 (2Q12) SAN Equipment market size, market share, and forecast report, which tracks SAN switches and adapters.

"Skyrocketing shipments of FCoE-capable switches and 16G FC products pushed the storage networking equipment market to new heights in the 2nd quarter, passing $1.5 billion," notes Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. "And there’s no end in sight. Thanks to the popularity of social networking and video sharing, as well as advances in cloud computing and the data center, we expect a cumulative $41.7 billion to be spent on SAN switches and adapters in the 5 years from 2012 to 2016."

SAN Equipment Market Highlights:

• The global SAN equipment market, including switches and adapters, grew 15% sequentially in 2Q12
• SAN adapter revenue fell 2% in 2Q12, due to weakness in the FCoE CNA segment, a bright spot just a quarter ago
• Cisco leads the overall SAN equipment market for the 5th consecutive quarter after posting a 31% increase in SAN revenue in 2Q12
• Brocade essentially owns the 16Gb FC segment, with an astounding 99% of global revenue market share
• While sales of FCoE-capable switches are strong overall, adoption lags for FCoE for storage transport

Infonetics’ quarterly SAN Equipment report provides worldwide and regional market size, vendor market share, forecasts, trends and analysis for FC HBAs, iSSI HBAs, FCoE CNAs, and chassis and fixed FC and all FCoE-capable switches that are purpose-built for the data center (10G FCoE, FC 2Gb, FC 4Gb, FC 8Gb, FC 16Gb, iSCSI).

Companies tracked include Brocade, Chelsio, Cisco, Dell, Emulex, IBM, Juniper, Mellanox, QLogic and others.