Data center Ethernet switch ports sold as part of a bundled solution made up 27 percent of all data center ports shipped in 2013, according to market research firm Infonetics Research. That’s expected to grow to 45 percent in 2018 as data center services become mainstream for businesses.
“There’s still room for best-of-breed in the Ethernet switch market, but as the industry moves beyond early adopters and the early market for data center fabrics, the next wave of adoption has to be made simpler for the ‘main street’ buyer,” notes Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “This will keep the market for best-of-breed solutions healthy even as a portion of the data center Ethernet switch market turns to bundled solutions.”
The research also found that nearly half of all converged data center network ports shipped in the fourth quarter of 2013 carried storage traffic. Infonetics forecasts Ethernet switch ports-in-use for storage to reach 55 percent of all data center purpose-built switch ports shipped in 2018.
Grossner added, “The shift to cloud-architected data centers with automated deployment of virtual workloads will require storage networking to be more agile, driving the need for a converged network with storage and application traffic on Ethernet.”
The bare metal switch market has the potential to transform a significant portion of the Ethernet switching market into a disaggregated model, similar to the server market. And, switch ports-in-use for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are expected to account for 22 percent of all data center purpose-built ports shipped in 2018.
