The bare metal switch market has the potential to transform a significant portion of the Ethernet switching market into a disaggregated model, similar to the server market, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.
“There’s still room for best-of-breed in the Ethernet switch market, but as the industry moves beyond early adopters and the early market for data center fabrics, the next wave of adoption has to be made simpler for the ‘main street’ buyer,” notes Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “This will keep the market for best-of-breed solutions healthy even as a portion of the data center Ethernet switch market turns to bundled solutions. The shift to cloud-architected data centers with automated deployment of virtual workloads will require storage networking to be more agile, driving the need for a converged network with storage and application traffic on Ethernet.”
Some highlights:
- Data center Ethernet switch ports sold as part of a bundled solution made up 27% of all data center ports shipped in 2013, growing to 45% in 2018
- Nearly half of all converged data center network ports shipped in 4Q13 will carry storage traffic
- Infonetics forecasts Ethernet switch ports-in-use for storage to reach 55% of all data center purpose-built switch ports shipped in 2018
- Switch ports-in-use for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are expected to account for 22% of all data center purpose-built ports shipped in 2018.