Data center expansion drives Ethernet switch market growth, says research firm

The data center market continued to be a source of growth for a number of the major Ethernet switch vendors in 2015 as Arista, Huawei and Juniper saw sales grow 41 percent, 125 percent and 15 percent respectively. Despite their gains, Cisco remains the top data center Ethernet switch vendor with 57 percent of total revenue. In 2015, the data center segment of the Ethernet switch market nearly reached $10 billion. While data center switches will drive almost all the growth in the overall market through 2020, Dell'Oro Group says the Ethernet switch market continues to fragment.

"We expect almost all growth in data center switches to come from the Cloud as economic headwinds will likely cause a modest contraction from Enterprises during the year," said Alan Weckel, vice president at Dell'Oro. "Additionally, we anticipate that for each year of the forecast period, the list of mega-Cloud data centers using white-box switches will increase."

Besides data centers, Dell'Oro says that servers will transition to 25/50 Gbps and switches will migrate to 25/100 Gbps in 2016. Release