Bare metal switches to accelerate in data centers, says Infonetics

Bare metal switches, which decouple hardware from software and offer other benefits including agility and cost savings over traditional data center switches, are making a bigger dent in the data center market, rising 11 percent in 2014, says Infonetics in a new report.

"Up till now, bare metal switching has been attractive mainly to the large cloud service providers (CSPs) like Google and Amazon who provide their own switch software integrated into data center orchestration and management platforms," said Cliff Grossner, research director for data center, cloud and SDN at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS, in a release.

Grossner added that "with vendors such as Dell and HP jumping into the mix with branded bare metal switches, adoption of bare metal switching is going to accelerate as tier 2 CSPs and large enterprises endeavor to achieve the nimbleness demonstrated by Google."

During the fourth quarter, the data center Ethernet switch market rose 5 percent sequentially, a factor Infonetics said was impacted by an uptick in spending by service providers and financial institutions. Likewise, the application delivery controller (ADC) segment has grown consistently on a year-over-year basis for the last seven quarters.

At the same time, Infonetics said that interest in optimizing the WAN via software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is strong, but the WAN optimization segment has yet to return to long-term growth.

Although the data center market achieved double-digit increases in 2011 through 2014, Infonetics said that "long-term growth in the data center market is expected to slow down by 2019, due to the migration to software-defined networking (SDN) and the shift to the cloud."

For more:
- see the release

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