Magic Quadrant for SAN Fibre Channel Switches, 1H03

Transcription

1 Markets, N. Allen, R. Passmore Research Note 1 May 2003 Magic Quadrant for SAN Fibre Channel Switches, 1H03 In the latest Storage Area Network Fibre Channel Switch Magic Quadrant, Brocade and McDATA still dominate, but Cisco is challenging. Core Topic Hardware Platforms: Storage Systems Key Issue How will storage systems evolve during the next five years? In this research, Gartner updates its assessment of each vendor's prowess in the Fibre Channel (FC) fabric switch market (see Figure 1). We rate each vendor's status in terms of the enduser experience of that vendor. The market has changed considerably since our first assessment in June 2002 (see "SAN 1-Gbps Fibre Channel Switch Magic Quadrant"). Gadzoox Networks has dropped out. Vixel has refocused on providing internal switches in storage subsystems. QLogic has maintained roughly a 10 percent market share and has renewed energy in selling technology to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). And, of course, Cisco Systems entered the market. A small startup, MaXXan Systems, has also announced a product, but we will assess it once it becomes more noticeable in the market. Another startup, Sanera Systems, is announcing its product, and we will treat it the same. Overall, at year-end 2002, the market had seen close to 3 million switch ports shipped, and we forecast that, in 2006, roughly 7 million ports will be shipped. The entire market reached almost $1 billion in Gartner Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Figure 1 Storage Area Network FC Switch Magic Quadrant, 1H03 Challengers Leaders McDATA Brocade Ability to Execute Inrange Cisco QLogic Source: Gartner Research (April 2003) Niche Players Visionaries Completeness of Vision As of April 2003 Storage Magic Quadrant Methodology Magic Quadrants measure the relative strengths of vendors in specific markets. Effectively, the Magic Quadrant maps a company's current capabilities against its future promises (see Figure 2). Using a Magic Quadrant to ease concerns about a company's long-term financial viability is reasonable. Using one as the sole justification in selecting a particular product or vendor is a misuse of the Magic Quadrant, because Magic Quadrants do not provide a direct measure of product attractiveness or a vendor's support capabilities. Table 1 shows our rating criteria and the weightings we used in our assessment. 1 May

3 Figure 2 Gartner's Magic Quadrant Focus on Tomorrow Challenger Leader Ability to Execute Executes well today, may dominate a large segment, but does not understand market direction. Niche Player Either focuses on a small segment and does it well, or is unfocused and does not outinnovate or outperform others. Executes well today, well-positioned for tomorrow. Visionary Understands where the market is going or has vision of changing market rules, but does not execute well yet. Focus on Today Completeness of Vision Source: Gartner Research (April 2003) Table 1 Vendor Rating Criteria and Weightings Execution Market Share 30% Marketing Effectiveness 20% Channel Effectiveness 10% Market Credibility 15% Financial Stability 10% Product Performance 10% Service 5% Vision Value-Added Functions 20% Product Alignment with Market 35% Software Architecture 10% Price/Performance 15% Market Technology Needs 10% Product Breadth 10% Source: Gartner Research (April 2003) Vendor scores are determined by how well a vendor does in each area and how important each factor is in the marketplace. Factors and weights are regularly reviewed for their continued relevance, their importance in the decision-making process, and their ability to explain a vendor's success in the marketplace. 1 May

4 Vendor Discussion Brocade: Brocade Communications Systems' name has become synonymous with FC fabrics. Brocade is the leading FC switch vendor, both in volume and in "mind share," and it dominates the non-director-class or basic switch market segment. Every major server vendor and third-party storage player resells Brocade products. Its SilkWorm product family is the most widely adopted and dominates unit shipments. According to Gartner Dataquest, at year-end 2002 Brocade had shipped 2.3 million switch ports about 100,000 of which were core switch ports. Moreover, Brocade has 2.1 times McDATA's revenue while shipping 3.4 times the number of ports, suggesting that Brocade has better appeal in the more-price-sensitive segments of the market. Brocade's software revenue and functionality have also advanced considerably, and its influence in the market has driven wide adoption of its proprietary application programming interfaces, even by IBM. However, it misread the market with respect to director-class products and has been scrambling to overcome this deficit. In 2002, it introduced a product that came close to director class, but it was missing the ability to change or failover to new firmware nondisruptively. That capability is in beta testing now, and initial feedback is positive. Moreover, Brocade gained considerable share last year with this product. Nonetheless, Brocade needs to improve its execution if it is going to maintain market share leadership. In addition, based on user feedback, Brocade needs to find a way to provide direct end-user support. On the vision front, Brocade recently completed the acquisition of Rhapsody Networks, which positions Brocade well for the emerging network-based storage application device/switch market and provides a strong answer to Cisco's coming offering in this space. To date, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and EMC have committed to exploiting this device, and others will follow. McDATA: McDATA switches are the safe, proven choice for director-class applications. McDATA created the director-class FC switch market and is noted for its prowess in this space, having added several key resellers in the past 12 to 18 months. McDATA also enjoys robust sales in the IBM mainframe Fibre Channel Connectivity (FICON) storage area network (SAN) switch market and continues to reap significant benefits from its non-fc Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON) products. Also, according to Gartner Dataquest, at year-end 2002, McDATA had shipped 675,000 switching product ports, of which 523,000 were director ports. 1 May

5 McDATA originally positioned its director-class product as the best and only solution for enterprise-class fabrics. However, as users demanded the higher port counts required for many server environments, McDATA introduced basic fabric switches and positioned them as edge devices. The strategy was to provide a core-to-edge capability where the fabric backbone and missioncritical connections use the director class, while cost-sensitive connections use basic fabric switches to multiplex many ports into one or two of the director-class connections. Today, however, McDATA is also addressing market requirements for larger switches, with its biggest switch now supporting 140 ports nice, but still bested by Inrange Technologies and Cisco. McDATA also scores well on the management front. It approaches centralized management from two aspects. It has a fabric manager that provides advanced management features, such as call home, notification, complete fabric topology views and access to element managers to manage the individual switches in the fabric. McDATA also offers element managers, accessible through fabric or through a separate Web browser, which are equivalent to Brocade's and provide basic elementlevel management, as well as access to standardized fabric services. In addition, McDATA's purchase of SANavigator, a fullfledged SAN management software offering, is beginning to pay off, because this product ranks well in our assessment of SAN management vendors. As we forecast in our first assessment, McDATA has moved into the Leaders quadrant and is well-positioned to remain there. Cisco: Cisco announced the MDS product family in 2H02, and beta tests were completed in 1Q03. As we noted in "The Cisco/Andiamo MDS Fibre Channel Switch Family," on paper, the products were best-of-breed, but had not been tested and certified by any OEMs. Today, IBM and HP have announced that they have certified the family; several beta sites have had MDS switches working with EMC, and many are in production today. Most of the other OEM channels are working to qualify the family some more quickly than others. Of the host bus adapter (HBA) vendors, only Emulex has announced certification, even though users have clearly deployed various vendors' HBAs with Cisco MDS switches. With the exception of IBM, independent software vendor and OEM SAN management and storage resource management software support for the family is still missing. However, Cisco claims that all of these will come early in 2H03. Nonetheless, we have talked with several Cisco MDS customers, and their reports are glowing, and Gartner has received quite a few inquiries on the Cisco MDS products. Thus, Cisco has clearly achieved challenger status. If it continues to execute, we would not be surprised to see Cisco in the Leaders quadrant by May

6 QLogic: Since acquiring Ancor in 2000, QLogic has maintained its position as a stable alternative supplier of FC fabric switches, with a 10 percent market share. It also supplies applicationspecific integrated circuits (ASICs) for the nascent embeddedswitch market and ASICs for Cisco switches. It has won a bid for a request for a design to supply FC switch blades to IBM for its blade server product and a newly available 64-port maximum modular switch. The switch blade, by using copper backplane connections to server blades, substantially reduces server-toswitch interconnect costs by virtue of the blade architecture. The high-port-count modular switch addresses a market opportunity for high-port-count installations, where the redundancy of lowcost switches provides the required availability at costs much lower than those of redundant director-class products. Of all the switch vendors, QLogic projects the best-articulated vision of future low-cost, high-volume products. QLogic lands in the Niche Players quadrant because the weightings tend to emphasize an enterprise switch focus, whereas QLogic has focused on the lowend, lower-cost and embedded-switch markets. Inrange: The Inrange FC/9000 director-class FC switch was the first to support 64 ports and featured leadership specifications. Inrange had a port count lead, offering 128 ports in 2001 and 256 ports in 2002, but Cisco now leads. Inrange also has management offerings that help to simplify and centralize management. Inrange's Enterprise Manager is a fabric manager that provides features such as call home, notification, complete fabric topology views and access to element managers to manage the individual switches in the fabric. With Inrange's PerformanceVSN, a hardware and software product set, customers can collect port- and device-level statistics from any switch or director in the SAN. PerformanceVSN is designed to work with any switch and provides historical and trending analysis for performance monitoring (thresholding, tuning and planning) and capacity planning. Since our first assessment, Inrange has gone though financial and management turmoil, but CNT just announced its intent to acquire Inrange, which should settle these issues. Inrange has also evolved into a significant player in the FICON market, but it has not yet established a strong presence in FC switches in the non-ficon space. Nonetheless, Inrange claims that revenue for the FC/9000 grew 35 percent in 2002 and notes that customers have the most flexibility, compared with its competitors, in intermixing 1-Gbps and 2-Gbps speeds. Inrange's product specifications are much better than its success in the market. Although Inrange can generate significant revenue through its own sales, it must follow through with more SAN integrators to benefit from their sales efforts if substantial market 1 May

7 share is to result. Perhaps CNT will succeed where Inrange fell short. Acronym Key ASIC Application-specific integrated circuit ESCON Enterprise Systems Connection FC Fibre Channel FICON Fiber Channel Connectivity HP Hewlett-Packard OEM Original equipment manufacturer SAN Storage area network Bottom Line: Brocade Communications Systems and McDATA will continue to fight for leadership in this market. In the near term, Inrange Technologies at the high end and QLogic at the low end will remain in third place. Assuming that Cisco Systems continues to execute, it will probably change this order. Enterprises should recognize that cross-vendor switch-to-switch interoperability is problematic it works at a low level, but moresophisticated use results in proprietary lock-ins. Users of current products should have a clear understanding of the upgrade paths to faster speeds and larger switches. Also, users expanding their fabrics should either stay with the same vendor or replace the entire fabric with products from another vendor. 1 May