Data Center Network
sponsored by Dell Force10
Ethernet Switch Market to Reach $28 Billion by 2016
By David SimsAccording to Datacenter Dynamics, industry analyst firm Dell’ (News 
- Alert)Oro Group is reporting that the Ethernet switch market should hit $28 billion by 2016, driven mainly by data center sales.
The rest of 2012 will be good, but the party really kicks off in 2013, according to Dell’Oro’s Alan Weckel, who points to the migration of servers to 10Gb Ethernet as when the good times start flowing.
“We believe that in 2013, most large enterprises will upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet for server access through a mix of connectivity options, ranging from blade servers, SFP+ direct attach and 10G Base-T,” Weckel told Datacenter Dynamics, adding that in 2014 SMBs will jump on the upgrade bandwagon.
Why all the switching -- sorry -- to Ethernet 10Gb? TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell brings up one possibility -- it’s a great way to knock the socks off of upper level management, since it “makes a drastic difference in operations and costs.” She noted a few months ago that Chelsio Communications (News - Alert) offered 10 Gigabit Ethernet products designed to “streamline operations and lower costs,” which, yeah, are two results pretty much guaranteed to knock off socks.
“The 10GbE standard offers 10 times the performance of its industry-standard predecessor 1Gb Ethernet, yet the transition from one to the other is fairly simple,” Datacenter Dynamics says, citing an Intel (News - Alert) whitepaper titled “10 Gigabit Ethernet technology overview” which calls 10GbE “a natural choice for expanding, extending and upgrading existing Ethernet networks.”
Campbell writes that “the demand for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is growing as a result of the benefits it has proven to deliver to the enterprise,” as long as aforesaid enterprise does its homework and performs an actual cost-benefit analysis, instead of just doing what everybody else is doing just because. “Weighing the benefits against the cost of implementation is no easy task,” Campbell writes, which of course is why so few companies routinely get the benefits they think they’ll get from their technology investments.
“Investments.” More like “wild bets,” frequently.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Rich Steeves
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