Re: [Veritas-bu] market coverage of tape libraries and SAN switches

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Shai Harmelin <shai.harmelin AT isilon DOT com> wrote:

I'm curious if you or anyone on the list can provide some guidance into who are the 3 main SAN switch vendors and who are the 3 main tape library vendors in the enterprise market and how big is their cumulative market share respectively.

I'll talk to the switch side of things - as a customer, not a vendor. Brocade has traditionally been (by far) the largest edge switch vendor. McData is/was 2nd, and then Qlogic. Brocade has since bought out McData. Qlogic edge switches go into sites where the customers want to do things very cheaply. It's not that the switches are all that bad because I haven't heard that if they are - it's that Qlogic has to compete on price because of the Brocade dominance.

On the director side, McData had the numbers for the longest time but Brocade was catching up fast. Before the merger, it was roughly a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split between Brocade, McData, and Cisco. Brocade now has 2/3 of the market.

From what I hear, Cisco directors go into sites that are already Cisco shops (or educational institutions that pay a fraction of what commercial customers pay) and at which the network groups manage the SAN. Brocade goes into just about everywhere else.

If you're an HP shop, you're adding Brocade gear by default. They sold the McData switches as an afterthought and now sell Cisco gear, but they'll always push Brocade first. For EMC, it was traditionally McData all the way - after all, McData was spun off of EMC in the first place. I don't know what they're doing now - their spec sheets on the "Connectrix" line lists the Brocade equivalents first and then Cisco.

.../Ed

--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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