FC HBA Records 2nd Consecutive Quarter of 30% Growth

As the supply-constraint-driven enterprise server and storage inventory levels have started to normalize, the demand for FC HBAs – which provide the mission-critical networking for these devices – has rebounded strongly. During the 1Q24, the FC HBA market posted its 2nd consecutive quarter of close to 30% revenue growth, according to a report from Crehan Research Inc.

The FC networking market has been bolstered by the recent strong customer adoption of 64Gb/s HBAs. In fact, 64Gb/s HBAs have recently started to see better customer adoption than that of 32Gb/s HBAs at a similar point in time

Stronger 64Gb/s HBA adoption has been helped by the arrival of Intel’s Sapphire Rapids server-class CPUs, with these scalable processor platforms placing more bandwidth demands on data center storage networks. Moreover, some enterprise customers are looking to incorporate high-speed FC HBAs into AI-optimized servers, in order to access their more-valuable and proprietary data residing on FC storage arrays.

Broadcom has been the main beneficiary of the stronger 64Gb/s FC HBA adoption as a result of its first-to-market Emulex product introductions and the incorporation of key security features within these. As a result, Broadcom accounted for the majority share of the 64Gb/s FC HBA market, as well as the overall FC HBA market.

“As enterprise storage networking demand has increased, FC has shown that it is still a vital technology in this realm, with robust market growth, said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research. “In correlation with the HBAs, FC switching revenue has also grown strongly over the past couple of quarters, with a Y/Y increase in excess of 25%.“