Storage Buzz June I

First things first: The FCoE standard has reportedly been finalized these days and you may expect the pace of announcements in the field of "converged network" storage gear to rise for the 2nd half of 2009.

Here's what IBM's Clod Barrera has to say about FCoE.

In a related move, IBM has re-entered the networking business!

Networking products are part of our "Dynamic Infrastructure" initiative and IBM is acknowleding the fact that server, storage, and networks are all key building blocks for an IT Infrastructure and customers want to have an option to source everything from one company.

(interestingly, some of the news releases from 1999 announcing the withdrawal of IBM from the networking business are still online.)

The networking war is also heating up on the fibre channel (FC) side of the market: Brocade reportedly gained market share versus CISCO and there may be various reasons for this:

a) CISCOs strong focus on FCoE (and therefor lack of focus on 8 Gbps FC)

b) CISCOs announcement to enter the market for blade servers which lets server vendors like HP and IBM scratch their heads and think twice about partnering with CISCO.

And lastly -looking at the first quarter market numbers- the good news is that data growth is continuing despite the crisis. However, data storage revenue is declining for the first time in many years and I'm personally convinced that this fact will lead to further consolidation in the market for the rest of the year.