Crehan Research: Growth in Faster Data Center Switches

Strong growth in faster, more expensive Ethernet data center switches will offset steep price declines in each of these high-bandwidth segments, according to a recent Data Center Switch Long-Range Forecast Report from Crehan Research Inc.

The firm forecasts that competition and other factors will lead to significantly lower per-port pricing on 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches, spurring stronger adoption of these technologies and resulting in relatively stable overall Ethernet data center switch average selling prices.

“Despite the onslaught of data center traffic and unprecedented network demands, high-speed data center switches thus far have been too expensive to drive widespread adoption, but this is about to significantly change,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “Aside from continual cost reductions and port-density improvements, price drops are being driven by factors such as increased competition in the data center switch market (including numerous recent entrants), low-priced white box and merchant operating system offerings, and the price negotiating power of some of the very large, hyper-scale public cloud vendors,” he said.

Crehan’s report forecasts that as a result of market migration to higher speed switches, Ethernet data center switch revenues will reach approximately $14 billion by 2018, with revenue growth slightly exceeding shipment growth. More specifically, the firm forecasts strong upcoming adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for data center server access, and 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet for data center uplink, aggregation and core deployments.

With its most recent Server-Class Adapter & LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) Long-Range Forecast Report, Crehan predicted that 10 Gigabit Ethernet will finally eclipse one Gigabit Ethernet by 2016 to become a majority of total shipments, closely following the mass adoption of Grantley-based servers.

http://www.CrehanResearch.com