Its easy to see Agilents dilemma. It reaped more than $200 million last year from its storage networking components business, representing roughly 20 percent of its overall revenue. Sales from this unit grew 80 percent over the previous year. And these numbers were driven in the majority by sales of its Tachyon Fibre Channel controller, which commands 60 percent of the market for FC chips. Moreover, the market for storage networking products is expected to grow 70 percent over the next three years.
Agilent says it's keeping a watchful eye on iSCSI and there's no danger it will miss the boat on the technology. Yet others have made much bolder moves. The budding standard, although not ratified yet, already has the backing of Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and most of the startups in this space, and the momentum behind it is building (see IP Storage Test Draws Crowd).
Instead of linking storage over limited FC distances of a few hundred kilometers, iSCSI wraps the data in IP to link it over much longer distances. As companies rely more heavily on online data to run their businesses, moving information across geographical boundaries becomes critical. iSCSI could be a handy tool for that application.
"Fibre Channel is dying," says James Jungjohann, analyst at CIBC World Markets, It would do Agilent no harm to look at whats happening to Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR).
Another storage components vendor, Finisar recently lowered its guidance and slashed its earnings expectations -- which analysts attributed partly to the economic slump but also to a slowdown in orders for traditional FC components (see Finisar Lowers Guidance).
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