A new report by telecoms and networking industry analyst Dell'Oro Group predicts that Fibre Channel switch revenues will exceed $2bn by 2008 and continually increase through to 2011.

"More and more enterprises are installing fibre cabling to future-proof their network," said Tam Dell'Oro, president and founder of Dell'Oro Group.

"Once fibre cabling has been installed, Fibre Channel becomes a 'no brainer' choice for storage networking over alternatives such as iSCSI and Ethernet.

"For example, on a high-end switch, 1Gbps Ethernet over fibre is selling for about $600 a port, the same price as a 4Gbps Fibre Channel port that provides four times the bandwidth."

The report also indicates that shipments of Host Bus Adapter (HBA) ports will grow "significantly" over the next five years as blade server manufacturers shift the manufacturing of mezzanine HBA cards to HBA vendors, such as Emulex and QLogic.