This IDC study provides IDC's 2007 worldwide market analysis and forecast for a critical component in the market for network storage solutions. It forecasts unit and port shipments as well as factory and market revenue for the sale of Fibre Channel (FC) switches. The study also includes 2006 vendor market share for FC switch revenue and shipments. This study discusses how future trends in server form factors, server virtualization, and competing technologies such as iSCSI will affect the competitive position of FC switch vendors.

"2008 and 2009 will be the peak years for FC switch sales thanks to server virtualization and blade servers," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems, at IDC. "Beyond 2009, growth rates for FC switch sales will slow significantly as the server consolidation and server virtualization in larger companies approach saturation levels, while midsize enterprises will often look to use iSCSI or SAS connectivity as an alternative."