History 2004: QLogic Pulls Even with Emulex in HBA Revenue

Dell’Oro Group report shows sales of SAN FC and HBAs decreased 3% in 2Q04. The FC switch segment of the market was flat, while the HBA segment declined 7% for the quarter.

“In the FC switch segment, Cisco continues to gain traction in large enterprise accounts, posting a 20% revenue growth in the second quarter,” said John Carvell, principal analyst for SAN research at Dell’Oro Group. “McData’s FC switch revenues declined in 2Q04 in part because of softer demand for its current modularproducts in anticipation of the launch of its new Intrepid 10000 Director product,”

During 2004, OLogic pulled ahead of Emulex in HBA port shipments and matched Emulex in HBA revenues for the 1st time.

“It appears that QLogic has overcome its channel inventory realignment challenges, but Emulex is still grappling with this issue,” said Carvell.

Dell’Oro Group also predicts that the WW FC switch market is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 17% over the next 5 years while the FC HBA market will grow an average of 11% annually over this same period. The FC SAN market will double from $1.8 billion in 2003 to $3.6 billion in 2008.

“This year, new product introductions and clean-up of channel inventories will set the stage for growth in port shipments to exceed 40% in 2005,” said Carvell. “Enterprises have been migrating to a SAN architecture from a direct attached storage model to reduce cost and complexity, centralize management, improve provisioning, and enhance reliability of their server and storage resources. This trend will continue to drive SAN growth for the next several years.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 200 on September 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.