So, How Big is the iSCSI Market?

My blog last week about the FCoE forecast got me thinking about the iSCSI market, so I asked around a bit about how big people think the iSCSI market is.  Most of them were quite low compared with the numbers reported by analysts.  The problem here seems to be two-fold:  first, iSCSI storage revenues and capacity shipment information doesn’t seem to be very widely reported; and secondly it tends to use infrastructure that is already there. 

 So let’s look first at the latter issue – the infrastructure.  Unlike Fibre Channel, where you can count HBAs and switch ports shipped to get a good idea of the size of the Fibre Channel networking market, with iSCSI that’s much more difficult to figure out.  The majority of people use iSCSI software initiators, which come free with the operating system, and the standard ports or NICS used for general data communications. That means that the number of iSCSI-connected servers is really hard to figure out.  Then at the switch layer, it’s difficult to assess what proportion of Ethernet switch ports shipped  are dedicated to iSCSI traffic.

 This was the focus of a great article by Frank Berry in Byte and Switch last month, “The  Hidden Value of iSCSI Networks”, in which he analyses the situation and assesses the annual networking revenue associated with iSCSI SANs.  The number he comes up with is $585 Million and growing rapidly.  This even surprised me, so I checked with some Ethernet infrastructure vendors who confirmed that the numbers looked about right.  Check out the article and see if you agree.

 Turning to the numbers for iSCSI storage systems, IDC has been tracking this data on a quarterly basis for years now.  Once again, it’s not quite as straightforward as in the case of fibre channel arrays since a significant percentage of iSCSI arrays support multiple protocols, so an assessment has to be made about primary use.  But I suspect that over the years IDC has developed a good methodology to make this assessment.

 In 2007, IDC estimates that 211 PB (211,000 TB) of iSCSI storage was shipped, yielding $789 million in revenue.  2008 saw massive growth with 500 PB (500,000 TB) shipped yielding $1.39 billion in revenue.  The first half of 2009 saw 378PB shipped for $810m – which leads me to conservatively expect an 800 PB (800,000 TB), $1.75 billion year.

 A big market, growing rapidly despite the economy.