Fibre Channel storage networking will soon take off at
firms and outstrip technologies built around Ethernet, said analyst
Dell’Oro Group.
In a Dell’Oro Group report, Fibre Channel switch
revenues are expected to exceed $2bn (£1.05bn) by 2008, and to
continually increase through to 2011.
“More and more enterprises are installing fibre cabling to
future-proof their network,” said Tam Dell’Oro, president of
Dell’Oro Group. “Once fibre cabling has been installed, Fibre
Channel becomes a no brainer choice for storage networking over
alternatives such as iSCSI and Ethernet,” said Dell’Oro
For example, said Dell’Oro, on a high-end switch, 1Gbps Ethernet
over fibre is selling for about $600 (£315) a port – the same price
as a 4Gbps Fibre Channel port that provides four times the
bandwidth.
The Dell’Oro Group report also indicates that the shipments of
Host Bus Adapter (HBA) ports will grow significantly over the next
five years, as blade server manufacturers shift the manufacturing
of mezzanine HBA cards to HBA vendors, such as Emulex and
QLogic.
IBM launches virtual fabric architecture
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