This IDC study provides IDC's 2009 worldwide storage interconnect analysis and forecasts and reflects significant adjustments based upon the impact of the current economic difficulties. It forecasts unit and port shipments as well as factory and market revenue for the sale of Fibre Channel host bus adapter and Fibre Channel switches. The study includes IDC's forecast for FCoE, iSCSI, NFS/CIFS, and SAS server interconnect ports. It also discusses how future trends in server form factors, server virtualization, and datacenter deployment strategies will affect storage interconnect requirements.

"The current slowdown and significant changes in the ways servers (blade servers), storage, and network elements are being deployed in datacenters will fundamentally alter product packaging for storage interconnect solutions, including FC infrastructure products." — Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems