COMMERCIAL NEWS
San Francisco, CALIF. — “It’s not about data backup, it’s about Data availability and reliability. Simplification of management reduces headaches and Costs,” claims analyst Clinton Vaughan, Salomon Smith Barney, in his “view from the analyst” presentation at the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) Annual meeting, held August 28-30th at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Beach, Calif.
This year’s annual meeting highlighted views from speaker’s representing a broad range of the Information Technology industry. The “Views from the Analysts” session also included James Opfer, senior analyst in Gartner Dataquest’s Research organization and Hamish Macarthur the founder of Macarthur Stroud International. Both Opfer and Vaughan touted the growth opportunities for the future of Fiber Channel. To further note, Dataquest preliminarily upped its storage networking revenue projection to $7 billion in 2004, representing an 87% CAGR (1998-2004). This is a significant increase from its previous projection of $3.5 billion in 2003. In addition, Dataquest upped its near term FC switch revenue CAGR from 250% to 300%. Also, Dataquest believes that in 2004 10 million switch ports and 5 million HBAs will ship. Switch revenues are expected to be about $5.0 billion and HBAs about $1.8 billion in 2004.
Other speakers at the conference included: David Simpson, editor-in-chief of Infostor who gave his “View from the Press;” Bob Adair of Storage Networks discussed “Storage Out-Sourcing;” Dan McCormick, director of product marketing and development for XIOtech Corp. discussed “Building a Storage Infrastructure- The Customer Experience;” Howey Chin, vice president of SAN Market Development for DataCore Software emphasized the benefits of “Storage Virtualization;” and Mark Teter a sales consultant for the Advanced Systems Group Calculated “SAN’s Return on Investment.”
“The expansion of E-commerce has led to the explosive growth-rate of data. Further, today’s methods of direct-attached storage can’t handle and are cost prohibitive to dynamic growth demands (about four times more costly to manage than when using SANs),” says Teter. “Dynamic efficiency becomes critical and companies need consistent support. SANs can handle the dynamics of this information explosion and facilitate the ease of continuous data integration. This means a positive return on investment for all companies using SANs.”
“We have the right technology, momentum, market demand and positioning. We have 300-plus Fibre Channel products from 68 companies, Fibre Channel is the only available open technology for SAN deployment and more than 85 percent of SAN installations are live,” states Skip Jones, Chairman for the FCIA. “Our mission is to continue to promote Fibre Channel world wide.” “Fibre Channel is the SAN.”
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is an international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators, developers, systems vendors, industry professionals, and end users. With more than 190 members and affiliates in the United States, Europe and Japan, the FCIA is committed to delivering a broad base of Fibre Channel infrastructure to support a wide array of industry applications within the mass storage and IT-based arenas. FCIA Working Groups focus on specific aspects of the technology that target both vertical and horizontal markets, including storage, video, networking and SAN Management. For information, visit the FCIA web site at http://www.fibrechannel.org .
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