FC SAN Connectivity Market Declines 3% Y/Y in 1Q14 – Dell’Oro

In a recently published SAN quarterly report by Dell’Oro Group, a source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, findings indicated the cloud is causing weakness in the FC SAN market and changing buying behavior in FC’s strongest segment, enterprises.  

This weakness contributed to a decline in overall market revenues, including FC switch and adapters, of 3% year-over-year in the first quarter 2014.

“Trends in the IT industry, including the explosion of mobility, the accelerated adoption of cloud services, virtualization, software defined networking, and growth in unstructured data, are changing hardware purchase preferences,” said Casey Quillin, director of SAN research, Dell’Oro Group. “This change is disruptive because preference in the cloud is increasing the need for new technologies such as distributed scale-out and object based storage options. Enterprise data centers are transforming into software defined data centers and the preference is also shifting towards interim Ethernet speeds and converged infrastructure.“

The report also discusses the outlook for market migration to 16Gb FC, new product offerings, and analyzes how FCoE is affecting FC adapter revenues.

Vendors currently offering FC switch and adapter offerings include Brocade, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic.