Record 4Q11 FC Switch Revenues for Brocade and Cisco

In a newly released SAN quarterly report by Dell’Oro Group, source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, FC switch and adapter revenues surpassed $691M in 4Q11.  

Both Brocade and Cisco realized record quarters with FC switch revenues of over $331M and $162M respectively. Brocade saw a 15% sequential increase in FC switch revenue, and continued strength in its 16 Gbps ramp, with over 80K ports shipped in the quarter.  

Cisco also had strong quarterly results with new Advanced Fibre Channel Modules for their director class switches, which offer new features like arbitrated local switching.

The report points to cloud and virtualization in large data center deployments as underlying drivers of the market growth.

"The data center is evolving so rapidly that the technology deployed in it likely will change more over the next ten years then it ever has in the past," said Casey Quillin, Senior Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. "The proliferation of virtualization and the adoption of cloud computing initiatives have created storage needs that are unprecedented.  This technology shift is really driving growth in the SAN market, making this is a very exciting time for storage networking, and we will continue to offer in-depth analysis as this dynamic unfolds."

The report also discusses alternative SAN technologies, such as FCoE, iSCSI, and NAS.