Although the SAN extension market is still in its infancy, there are already plenty of players fighting for the service providers attention. While Nortel accounts for 45 percent of the market, according to a recent IDC report, ADVA AG Optical Networking (Frankfurt: ADV) holds a good chunk of the remaining market share. Other established players, such as Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU), and Tellabs Inc. (Nasdaq: TLAB; Frankfurt: BTLA) are also edging their way into the ring.
Observers say the greatest potential market growth could lie in Asia, where companies have had far less access to dark fiber (see BT Cranks Up SANs on the MAN and AT&T Puts Hands on SANs).
Dark fiber has not been available in Asia, says Brian McCann, chief marketing and strategy officer for ADVA. High-performance storage networks werent possible before, so a lot of these guys were doing tape. This posed huge problems, he says, pointing out that while mirroring 60 Tbytes of data to a remote data center over DWDM might take five hours, the same transaction would take about five months over a T3 connection.
While hes not celebrating competitor Nortels contract win with NTT, McCann says its actually a good thing for the industry. You need two companies to make and drive a market, he insists.
Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch
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