Market Profile: Next Generation Fibre Channel Storage Systems

Next generation systems revenue will experience explosive growth over the forecast period. We expect next generation Fibre Channel storage systems to grow from $170M in 2007 to $2.007B in 2011 - 85 percent CAGR. Both next generation high-end and mid-range storage systems should equally contribute to the overall growth and size of the category.

Taneja Group considers a Fibre Channel storage system to be any external array that contains one or more controllers, cache, a power supply, and multiple disk drives and is accessible by hosts over a Fibre Channel fabric. Furthermore, in today's marketplace, storage systems often support multiple block protocols such as ESCON/FICON, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel. Taneja Group recognizes the emergence of a new class of storage systems that we refer to as next generation storage systems. For the past decade, the Fibre Channel storage marketplace has been dominated by the major storage vendors, such as EMC, HDS, IBM, and HP.

The barriers to entry into this market have been high because organizations' have been loath to trust anyone, but the most established players with their data. As a result, the Fibre Channel storage market has been impervious to rapid change and innovation like we have witnessed in other sectors of infrastructure IT. However, with the advances in storage virtualization, thin technologies, and clustered system design, a new class of entrants has demonstrated that they have the mettle to compete with the entrenched tier 1 players on their terms.