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ShareRadar Picks Up CNA Growth In Q3
Posted by Frank Berry on November 12, 2009
On November 11, Emulex and QLogic issued press releases announcing their respective Fibre Channel HBA market share gains in Q3CY09. Emulex highlighted a 4 percent gain in the standalone 8Gb HBA segment while QLogic emphasized their strength in blade server mezzanine cards that led to a overall 1.9 percent gain in market share. As the two giants in the Fibre Channel HBA market slug it out for a percentage or two each quarter, the new market for CNAs is quickly appearing on the radar.
During calendar 2009, Brocade, Emulex and QLogic announced a variety of design wins with Dell, IBM and HP for CNAs in PCI-E form-factors or CNAs in blade server mezzanine card form-factors. Other announcements this year covered the virtualization-optimized Palo CNA from Cisco and ConnectX EN from Mellanox. Each of these products includes support for Data Center Ethernet (DCE), the foundation of all CNAs.
According to an IT Brand Pulse Industry Brief, Manufacturer CNA port volume increased 133 percent quarter-over-quarter to a total of 9,800 ports, and revenue increased 148 percent quarter-over-quarter to $4.0 million. The rapid growth of CNA volume and revenue was led by Emulex with 163 percent quarter-over-quarter growth to $2.5 million and 170 percent quarter-over-quarter growth to 7,300 ports shipped. This growth positioned Emulex at the end of Q3CY09 with 2.1 x the revenue and 3.6 x the ports of their nearest competitor, QLogic.
Through Q3CY09, CNA volume was driven by Emulex and QLogic partnerships with Cisco. During Q4CY09 and Q1CY10, the assault on the legacy markets for Fibre Channel HBAs and Ethernet NICs will begin in earnest as activities at Dell, HP and IBM transition from CNA technical and sales training to CNA deployments.
Emulex enters CY10 with a product rich in NIC functionality and partnerships with OEMs to satisfy 10Gb NIC demand with Emulex CNAs. Support for iSCSI and FCoE offload will be added with pay-as-you-go upgrades in Q4CY09 or Q1CY10.
Comment by Knows The Real Deal on November 12, 2009 1:26 PM
Frank is so blinded by his extreme hard-on for QLogic that he simply cannot see the forest for the trees. ELX is reselling the Server Engines NIC. Period. Be interesting to see what their plan B is, once Broadcom buys Server Engines.
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Comment by Frank Berry on November 12, 2009 1:34 PM
Knows The Real Deal - The article is about market share data which speaks for itself. Please help me understand how what you just said has anything to do with that data. Thanks, Frank
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Comment by KillBill_1963 on November 12, 2009 1:51 PM
Frank, could you provide some context for those 9,800 ports / $4.5 million revenue? How does that compare, for example, to the number of Fibre Channels ports (8Gb and 4Gb) shipped during the same time period? How does it compare to Ethernet NIC ports? Is it a tiny sliver of overall ports shipped, so that the high percentage growth rate is not as impressive as at first glance)? Or is this a substantial portion of the number of overall ports shipped in this segment? Thanks in advance.
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Comment by Frank Berry on November 12, 2009 3:30 PM
KillBill, - In 2009 2.5M Fibre Channel HBA ports will ship along with 136M 1/10Gb Ethernet NIC/LOM ports -- about 36M of which will go into the data center. So I agree CNA growth is on a small base. More important than the absolute numbers are: a) The race is now on as we move past evaluations and demos to widespread OEM marketing and customer deployments, b) the race is for all the marbles = NIC/LOM + FC HBAs + InfiniBand HCAs, and c) I believe whovever gets advantage in the NIC market is a winner. I look forward to regularly updating the data to see what trends form. - Frank
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Comment by fiber channel vs iscsi on November 29, 2009 6:42 PM
I would like to learn more about how ISCSI is progressing in the market vs Fiber channel. Also checkout the following blog to learn more on cisco network technologies.
http://freeciscolearning.blogspot.com/
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Comment by Frank Berry on November 30, 2009 3:55 PM
fiber channel vs iSCSI - My short answer is I estimate about 750,000 iSCSI host ports were configured in 2009 vs. 2.5 million Fibre Channel host ports. In addition, iSCSI is growing at around 10% quarter-over-quarter while Fibre Channel is pretty flat. - Regards, Frank
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