The transmission of Ethernet frames at 25 Gigabits per second (25GE) is making its entrance in the converged network adapter market.
IHS projects around 2 500 25GE ports will ship in the fourth quarter of 2015, growing to 9% of all adapter ports shipped worldwide in 2019, according to the IHS Infonetics SAN and Converged Data Center Network Equipment report.
“With its higher bandwidth, the 25/100GE architecture is attractive to large cloud service providers and enterprises looking to migrate from 10GE switching and server connectivity to 100GE switching and 25GE server connectivity in the data centre,” says Dr Cliff Grossner, research director for data centre, cloud and SDN at IHS. “QLogic continues to prepare for the launch of 25GE, demonstrating interoperability with HP and Dell switches after doing so with Broadcom.”
“At the same time, the Fibre Channel SAN market is seeing weaker demand for flash drives, negatively impacting revenue expectations for 2015,” Grossner says.
According to the report, global fibre channel storage area network (SAN) revenue – including fibre channel switches and host bus adapters (HBAs) – is down 11% sequentially in 1Q15, and up 1% from 1Q14, to $595-million.
Brocade continues to lead the FC SAN market, but faces operational issues with the IBM/Lenovo transition.