Sales of data center Ethernet switches saw the strongest growth in five years during the second quarter of 2017, with year-over-year growth of fourteen percent, according to the latest report from Crehan Research Inc.
“2Q17 was a particularly strong quarter for data center Ethernet switching, as customers responded very favorably to the many compelling products that have arrived on the market,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “These switches not only have significantly improved price performance, but also additional visibility, programmability, security, and automation capabilities, enabling customers to handle a diversity of data center networking workloads at scale in a more cost effective and simpler way.”
In addition to stellar overall market growth during the quarter, notable results from Crehan’s data center switch report include:
- Juniper Networks had the strongest growth in data center switching revenues, with a 60% year-over-year increase.
- In the modular data center switch segment – which is most indicative of aggregation/spine deployments –100GbE shipments surpassed 40GbE shipments
- Arista Networks accounted for the largest share in 100GbE data center switch shipments.
- Cisco Systems continues to drive the growth in 25GbE data center switching, with its Cloud Scale Nexus 9000 platform comprising the vast majority of total 25GbE market shipments.
- Despite the strong 25GbE increase, 10GbE shipments continued to show robust growth, with overall data center switch shipments increasing in excess of 10% year-over-year on the strength
- of very healthy 10GBASE-T adoption in both enterprise and service provider data center networks.
The strong initial adoption of 25GbE and 100GbE data center switches is in keeping with Crehan’s January 2017 long-range forecast, which noted that 25GbE and 100GbE were expected to ramp rapidly and comprise over half of all shipments by 2021.
