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Data centre hunger gives Ethernet switch market a boost

Market getting ready for 25/50 Gbps

Market research outfit Infonetics reckons the data centre Ethernet market is set for a shake-up as 25 Gbps and 50 Gbps drive the migration from 10 Gbps products.

Reporting on third quarter sales from 2014, the company's Data Center Network Equipment report says with Broadcom set to ship its 25G and 50G silicon, it's vendors are pushing ahead with product development ahead of IEEE standardisation.

Data centre, cloud and SDN directing analyst Cliff Grossner says the emerging technologies will revise data centre architectures for “large cloud service provivders looking to migrate from 10 Gbps Ethernet switching and server connectivity to 100GE switching and 25GE server connectivity”.

The 25/50 Gbps Ethernet development effort started in earnest last July when Google, Broadom, Arista and others established a consortium to drive the standardisation.

The IEEE soon followed with a study group to work on MAC layer specifications.

Infonetics says the demands of data centres are giving Ethernet a nice boost, with Q3 global sales up 5 per cent on the previous quarter to US$2.2 billion.

The research also suggests that virtual application delivery controllers (ADCs) are supplanting pizza-box deployments: the virtual ADC market rose 20 per cent in the quarter, while revenue from traditional ADCs fell 2 per cent.

The WAN optimisation market is also struggling: while it put on nine per cent revenue growth quarter-on-quarter, it's still down one per cent year-on-year. ®

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