The tale behind the figures? With McData soon to be out of the picture, Brocade and Cisco will battle intensely for McData customers as those customers start to upgrade. (See Users Ponder Life Under Brocade.)
"Cisco has been certainly gaining share over the last several quarters," Dell'Oro says. "There might be a quarter or two here or there where they pop down, then they pop back up. Now the question is, 'Are McData customers going to buy stuff from Brocade or Cisco on the high end?' You can bet Cisco is going to be offering some aggressive swapouts."
Dell'Oro breaks Fibre Channel switch revenue into classifications that include modular switches (directors) and fixed switches, defining modular as switches with redundant power supplies, fans, control modules, and hot-swappable modules. Fixed switches have a fixed number of ports, and cannot be upgraded. Dell'Oro does not use port count as a differentiator, but directors generally have 64 or more ports.
Dell'Oro numbers shed light on the storage performance by Cisco, which does not break out its exact storage revenue in its earnings reports. (See Cisco Storage Spikes and Cisco Doubles SAN Sales.) They also show how much the director landscape has changed since Cisco entered the market.
For the full year of 2003, McData owned 52.3 percent of the director share compared to 28.8 percent for Brocade and 8.8 percent for Cisco. Last year, McData's share decreased to 38 percent with Cisco at 33.1 percent and Brocade at 27 percent.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
