The growth of data centers will be a boon for Ethernet switch vendors, says Dell'Oro Group in a new report.
A particular area of Ethernet switch growth in the data center is coming from white box/bare metal switching, which reached 7 percent of data revenue last year.
Despite the growth trends, the research firm said that the Ethernet switch market continues to fragment as the campus, data center, small/medium business (SMB) and carrier Ethernet segments grow and contract in different ways.
"The Ethernet switch market continued to evolve rapidly in 2014 with vendors performing very differently in each segment of the market," said Alan Weckel, vice president of Ethernet switch research at Dell'Oro Group, in a release.
Weckel added that ongoing cloud adoption and the need for higher Ethernet speeds, ranging from 25-100 Gbps, will drive new changes in the vendor community.
"In looking to our forecast, we believe the demands of the cloud and higher speeds of Ethernet such as 25 Gbps, 50 Gbps, and 100 Gbps, will cause the vendor landscape in the data center market to change significantly," Weckel said. "At the same time we believe the campus market is about to go through a mini upgrade cycle to 2.5 Gbps and 5.0 Gbps to support higher speed WLAN Access Points."
In an earlier report, Dell'Oro revealed that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) ongoing movement into the cloud drove up fourth-quarter Ethernet switch revenues to what it described as an "all-time high."
For more:
- see the release
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