Customer adoption of 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 25GbE data center switches increased significantly in 2018, with shipments of each technology more than doubling year-over-year, according to the latest report from Crehan Research Inc.
This increase drove the overall data center Ethernet switch market to its strongest shipment growth since 2015 as well as to record revenue results. Furthermore, as shown in the accompanying figure, annual 100GbE data center switch port shipments surpassed those of 40GbE, a transition that has occurred approximately just three years after initial high-density 100GbE switch silicon-based systems started production shipments.
“10GbE and 40GbE data center switch shipments each declined in 2018, while 25GbE and 100GbE continued to grow significantly, signaling that we are now solidly in the 100/25GbE era,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “Because of its compelling
value propositions, this modern data center architecture is now being widely deployed across public, private, and hybrid cloud data centers to handle a broad and diverse set of application workloads.”
Other noteworthy results from Crehan’s data center switch report include:
- Overall market average selling prices were (once again) very stable in 2018. In fact, over the past four years, overall data center Ethernet switch market average selling prices have fallen by less than five percent in total.
- Cisco accounted for about half of total branded data center Ethernet switch revenues in 2018, driven by very strong customer adoption of its Nexus 9000 series 100GbE and 25GbE data center
- switching products.
- Arista gained the most data center Ethernet switch revenue and shipment share in 2018, picking up three share points in both of those areas.
- Despite a significant slowdown in 4Q18, both Huawei and H3C also had annual data center Ethernet switch share gains in 2018.
- Although total 10GbE data center switch shipments declined in 2018, 10GBASE-T shipments continued to grow, even with weakness in this segment in the latter half of the year.
- “The wide deployment of 100GbE switching, with an annualized port shipment run-rate now approaching the tens of millions, sets a very solid foundation for the upcoming 400GbE ramp likely starting in the second half of this year,” Crehan said.
