Global data center network equipment revenue - including data center Ethernet switches, ADCs and WAN optimization appliances (WOAs) - grew 8 percent in 2014 from 2013, to $11.2 billion, according to technology market research firm, Infonetics Research. The firm said that this growth will be accompanied by an acceleration in the deployment of bare metal switches, in tandem with the demand for increased agility and flexibility by larger organization, especially for those in the digital services space.
In the data center market, 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, said the firm. Within the Ethernet switching market, Infonetics said that the new 25GE ports will begin shipping in 4th quarter of this year, representing a new 25/100GE architecture for data center fabrics targeted at large CSPs, a key high-end market segment.
Infonetics however cautioned that following double-digit increases in 2011 through 2014, long-term growth in the data center market is expected to slow down by 2019, braked by the migration to software-defined networking (SDN) and the shift to the cloud.
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. But 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.
